The Pawnbroker (22 page)

He picked up Mrs. Harmon's silver-plated candlesticks. Something nipped at the edges of his mind, so he stood there with the candlesticks in his hands like a great votive statue, trying to chase away the flickers of feeling.

Mabel Wheatly came in with a swish of blue satin and strong scent. She stopped suddenly in the middle of the store, staring at the Pawnbroker, who stood with the empty candlesticks formalizing him. And she had a momentary impulse to perform some sort of obeisance; he looked holy.

"Candlesticks," Sol said to her, nodding in a dazed way at his hands.

Mabel looked back over her shoulder uneasily, considering retreat from that strangeness. The fluorescents hummed softly, and one faulty tube flickered every so often; it gave the scene the quality of an old, much-used movie.

Sol twisted his face spasmodically, looked in disgust at the candlesticks, and put them down on the counter.

"All right, what can I do for you?" he asked, going behind the part of the counter where the barred wicket was. He felt sure of himself there. It relieved Mabel to see him there, too; he was the Pawnbroker again and nothing confusing or disturbing. You could always do some kind of business with the Pawnbroker.

She smiled and moved to the counter with her hip-grinding, professional walk.

"Where Ortiz gone to?" she asked, bending her head to her pocketbook and looking up at him from the corners of her eyes.

"He has gone already for the night."

"Oh?" She looked around nervously, then leaned against the counter in a manner calculated to display the bare tops of her breasts. "Well I just out for a walk—killin' time like."

He stared blankly, no haven for the restless.

"You know..." She smiled slightly and gazed at the wall with conversational ease. "I been tryin' to raise money. Seem like I got this idea to go into business."

"I had thought you already
were
in business," he said sourly.

"Aw no, not like that," she said with a little giggle. "I mean legitimate, real business."

"You, too?"

"Well, a acquaintance of mine has got this idea for a business...."

"I have a good idea who your acquaintance is."

"The whole thing is, you need cash."

"What are you telling this to me for? I am going to close the store. Do you have something to show me? Otherwise, please, I am tired, it is late...."

"Well-1," she said with uncertain coyness, her eyes everyplace but on him. "I gonna have a nice piece of jewelry later in the week...."

"Suppose we talk about it then." He turned away from her and went back to that aimless straightening of stock.

"Maybe I got
somethin'
right now," she said in a loud half-whisper. She flicked a glance toward the doorway before turning back to him. The thing was, she had to get some money quickly; she felt that Jesus was considering some plans that excluded her. Suddenly she had conceived the wild idea of selling her body around the clock, day and night without letup.

Sol turned back to wait for what she had to say.

"Uh, you live around here, Pawnbroker?" she asked, sensing dimly a need to slow down her importunities with this man. But he certainly didn't look as if he got what he needed from women; he should be eager to accept her kind of offer.

"What is this? I have no time for visiting. Come to the point. Do you want something or are you just passing the time of day?"

"Well I tol' you I need to get some money...." Suddenly she saw her simple plan fading in the cold glare of the Pawnbroker's stare. Desperately, she threw her dog-eared cards on the table. "I'm
good,
Mister, real good. You know what I mean. I know tricks you never even dream of. Anythin' go with me, Pawnbroker. You give Mabel twenny dollars an' I make you so happy...."

She leaned toward him as much as the counter permitted, and Sol stared speechlessly at her soft, swelling flesh, not sure for the moment which dimension this was happening in.

"You got a back room here someplace, a couch like? Oh man, I can give you such a time. We could make it together like this...." And she proceeded to catalogue in explicit detail all she could offer; the obscene words came from her lips quite dryly and unshockingly.

After a few minutes of the Pawnbroker's stunned silence, she walked to the little gate and came around behind the counter, hesitatingly at first and then more confidently, until she was close to him. Then she cupped her breasts in her hands and asked him to lock the door so they could get on with it.

If he had suddenly shouted at her, or even struck at her, she would not have been so startled. But he spoke in a quiet, ancient voice that chilled her through and through.

"You do not have to do this. Your body does not interest me," he said. And it was true; the slow, heavy thudding he felt in his groin betokened pain rather than pleasure. "Take your pitiful flesh away from me. Here, here is money," he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a crumpling of dollar bills, which he shoved at her hands. "You have nothing worth buying, you see. So just take the money; it is charity. Take it and go very quickly. Get out of here. You sicken me. I am sick enough already. Go on, go ...
GET OUT OF HERE
!" And though by contrast the last few words seemed like a shout, all of it was really soft and icy and inflectionless.

And it seemed to Mabel Wheatly that suddenly a power out of her childhood condemned her again. She tasted again the verminous shame of her first sins, and quivered as she had then. She ran out from behind the counter crying, "Aw no, I sorry, I sorry..." and her apology followed her out of the store at some small distance.

"How do you like that!" Sol said aloud to the stillness. "Was ever a man visited with such insanity, with such creatures!" He began to chuckle mirthlessly as he started locking up. But the chuckle was so brittle and unreal that it degenerated to an indescribable shuddering. He stood with his head bent, one hand on the switches that had darkened all the fights but the one small incandescent night light in the office, the other hand on his head to hold it steady in the harsh, dry spasms that hammered at him. The spasms stopped, as quickly as they had come. He walked, with that careful head-favoring gait, out of the store and into the warm evening of the street.

He moved lumberingly, a great accumulation of strange severances, of poorly connected cogs and gears and ratchets, off balance, the imbalance overcompensated for, and so balanced again. His every motion was the result of some precise plan. His memory was screened off, his hopes had long ago been amputated. Each sense was allowed only a moment's play as he walked down the motley avenue, past a church that looked like an old theater and promised Redemption in hand lettering, past a butcher shop whose sign was in Spanish and whose screen door was blanketed with meat-hungry flies, past a dazzling dental office that looked like a big store and advertised a dozen dentists (No Waiting). And he was filled with a garish complexity of vigilance, every part of him wired and patched ingeniously; he saw, he moved in a chosen direction, he got through the days, earned money, held things at bay. Who could tell that inside, his spirit was like an old and shoddy carnival ground, threadbare, precariously tied and repaired, and with those parts that were too mangled and atrocious to look at discreetly covered with worn canvas and shoved into the dark and littered corners of his soul? Let him just continue like this, let all the wiring hold, let the screened-off parts stay covered, the creaking, squeaking machinery keep going, until death could come and eradicate the whole laboring thing all at once. Just don't let it come undone now, he asked in what would have been a prayer had it been addressed to anyone outside himself. Just let it hold until I'm dead; don't let it happen while I'm alive, or I will be forced to live in the chaos.

He crossed the street, looking carefully in both directions first, like someone whose safety really concerned him. The asphalt was still soft from the day's heat, and the cars moved over it with a faint sucking sound. He came to the cafeteria and looked in the window as he passed.

Halfway back, Jesus Ortiz sat talking to three men. Sol couldn't be sure of one of them at that distance; the black suit might or might not be Tangee's. But the ash-gray suit was as forbiddingly unique as a granite boulder in a field of flowers. For a moment or two, he stood swaying in front of the window like a plaintiff at the Wailing Wall, his mouth twisted bitterly, the sound of his laboring breath filling his ears.

"Yes, yes, Jesus Ortiz, I should have known ... all of you, all of you..."

He began to walk again; one foot forward, then the other. Swing the pelvis, lean the heavy mass, thrust, push, operate the body by memory. Past the Army-Navy store, and the open-air clothing mart, its bins filled with color, its pipe racks decked with house dresses, and the dark women moving chatteringly around and about the clothing like eager birds; past a fried-chicken and fish-and-chips restaurant redolent of frying fat and saloons sending out gusts of beer smell and coarse laughter.

Across the street, a policeman stood swinging his club for amusement. He stopped suddenly to stand motionless and watchful, in a manner that made the hairs stand up on Sol's neck. The shabby street compressed the air around him. He began to walk a little faster, stumbled, and righted himself with a sense of panic. Now he set one foot before the other with even greater concentration; it looked as if he were walking through mud and it was a terrific effort; his breath struggled through an elaborate series of barricades and torturous turnings. He began to feel nauseated, and in his attempt to control the nausea, he clenched his steel teeth. It only made his breathing more difficult.

Then he came to the river. The air was slightly cooler there, no fresher or sweeter smelling, but full of a small and steady movement. He stopped at the edge to let his shuddering breath slow down.

A dark barge moved at a funeral pace, and he stood watching it pass under one bridge after another, heading for the invisible sea. A sudden yearning raked him, and he imagined himself lying flat on his back on a barge as somber and silent as that one, moving toward the sea, seeing one bridge after another obscure the sky briefly, feeling the water grow bigger beneath him, spread to the endlessness of open ocean, with stars over him so distant there was no way to judge movement by them, and all quiet except for the murmurous, tending sea and him lying there with folded hands, floating in eternal peace....

After a while, he began to walk again in the direction of the garage. He went under the railroad bridge, under the almost constant roaring of the trains pulling into or out of the 125th Street station. Bits of soot dropped on him. The din comforted him, deafening him even to his thoughts. People were like shadows, their voices were part of the one huge clatter of trains and cars. Almost by instinct, he turned at 125th Street.

There was always a gathering of people there, clustered around the magazine stand, going into or out of the station.

A man was standing and arguing with the news dealer.

"You try to humiliate me, right in public. You accuse me of stealing—what, your cheap pornography, your stupid ›

"Let's just see in your bag there then, if you're so innocent," the news dealer, a gray-stubbled man with a face like a collapsed balloon, said in a tired, ruthless voice.

"This, this," shrieked the man, whose back was to Sol, as he held up a swollen brief case. "I have only important business papers in here. Lifes and deaths is in here!"

"I seen you reading that Yiddish paper and now it's gone. I only had the one," the news dealer said, leaning over the counter as though to be ready to grab the accused.

"Ah, so there's no end to the persecution, is there?" the accused man said with a quivering, hoarse voice. "All right, I am used to torture—twenty-four hours a day I have it. Look," he said, opening the brief case. "I have just this one
Forward
I purchased this morning in the Bronx," he said slyly, holding the paper up in triumph.

"That's the paper, you tricky bastard. The
Forward
don't come out until two. Pay me for that paper or I call a cop."

"No end, no end," the man with the brief case cried out in ridiculous yet strangely convincing agony.

He turned around with his hands out in a beseeching shrug for the world to witness. And Sol saw it was Goberman.

With his arms still out, the heavy, open brief case dangling from one hand, he recognized Sol. For several seconds they stared at each other without movement. Even the news dealer seemed puzzled by the sudden paralysis of his opponent. The uncertain light caught glints in Goberman's protruding eyes, hard little brilliants, at once false and tragic, like diamond-studded tears in some odd commemorative statue. Then Goberman's arms sagged, his eyes ran down Sol's figure like two timid mice, and he was a rag figure, teetering on the edge of his own abyss.

Sol began to walk past him, and Goberman turned back to the news dealer.

"How much, then; I haven't the strength," he said.

Sol hurried a little now. His back held the force of something following but he didn't dare turn to find out what it was. Somehow he knew he would not see what it was even if he turned.

When he got into his car, he raced the motor. Then he jammed his foot on the accelerator viciously, so that he skidded out into the street like someone escaping from a crime.

It had been cloudy and hot all day Thursday. But at seven thirty in the evening, as Sol walked down the battered causeway of Bathgate Avenue toward Tessie's house, the sun came out with a cruel brilliance that seemed to curl up the bits of rubbish in the streets. This satire on sunsets struck like flame against the weary old people sitting on steps and goaded the children to excesses of noise and violence. Two boys bounced against him and kept going, oblivious of his absent curses. A block away a woman screamed at someone who didn't answer her. He almost slipped and fell on a moldering lettuce leaf as he turned into the hallway.