The Pawnbroker (25 page)

The boat chugged softly along, past the neat Hudson River towns. The burble of people's voices all along the deck was like part of the sound of their passage. Marilyn sat without moving, her lips slightly parted, her eyes bright and tender on the Pawnbroker's strangely softened face; she maintained her stillness as though she feared to puncture the delicate surface of his reminiscence.

"We took our food then, too," he went on. "Of course my mother would not have us eat the food that was not kosher. We sat on the deck, just as we are doing now, and we ate and watched the farms and the woods going by." He took off his glasses to blind himself to the present, and his fingers traced the shape of them around his eyes. "The types you saw then! Peasants like animals, a few crazy Russians bellowing songs ... It was a beautiful country, a beautiful river...."

When he put back the glasses with a stern expression, she began unpacking the lunch.

"I don't know about you, but I'm getting hungry," she said. "Not that it takes much for me to get hungry. My appetite is my ruination. Someday I'll just blow up like a balloon and burst."

"You are not too fat," he said politely. "It is becoming for a woman to be, to be..."

"Fat," she said humorously.

"No, no," he protested, his hand up in objection as he smiled. "You are a healthy, attractive woman."

For a minute there was an awkward silence between them; something obviously impossible had been touched upon. She busied herself with the sandwiches and the thermos bottle while he frowned unseeingly at the approaching Tappan Zee Bridge.

They ate in silence for a while. They passed under the great span and left it behind. Then, after Sol had eaten one of the sandwiches, he sat back with the other one, still wrapped, in his hand.

"One forgets how attractive America must be," he said. "Most of my time has been spent in the city. Of course, I live in Mount Vernon, which I suppose is an attractive-enough town. But I derive no pleasure from it. There must be thousands of miles of lovely countryside, and I have heard that some of the mountains are very impressive. Often I have thought I would like to go up some very high mountain. I have the idea it would be very beautiful and peaceful. The world might look quite worth while from those heights. You would not see people or dirt or..." He waved his hands at those things he did not wish to mention.

"And yet," she said, "nowadays Americans all want to go to Europe. They go by the hundreds of thousands. People save for years just to have a few weeks there."

"Why is this so?"

"Oh, I guess people are impressed with the history and the sophistication, the culture."

"They are fools. Europe is a graveyard," he said harshly.

"You have seen it at its worst," she reminded him.

"Not at its worst—as it really is!"

"Would you judge all people by the very worst you have seen?"

"I do," he said coldly. "But this is an unpleasant turning our conversation has taken. Please, I am finding the day very restful. Let us not examine, you promised not."

"Yes, of course. I'm sorry." She sighed and let her head fall back on the chair. "Wouldn't it be wonderful," she said, "if this trip could last for a long, long time? To think of nothing except what pretty scene might appear around the next turning. To talk and eat when we were hungry and sleep when we were drowsy. And then to wake, as you did when you were a child, to see the woods and fields going by and know how much went by while you slept."

"That would be nice—if it were possible."

"For now, we can pretend it is."

"I am not very good at pretending."

"But you will try, just for today," she begged with a smile.

"I will try," he agreed gently.

The country grew wilder and greener, and the houses were farther and farther apart. Occasionally, a swift cruiser passed them; sometimes they passed a tiny rowboat with people fishing. Hills scalloped the sky, and the sun covered the water with a multitude of tiny brilliants, which flashed in their faces and made them close their eyes and talk sleepily of small, almost intimate things.

"It's hard for me to realize that I usually have to read to get myself to sleep," she said. "Right now, I feel I could sleep without the slightest effort."

"I have the habit of reading before bed, too," he said.

"I read mostly novels, the old ones: Thackeray, Dickens, stories of a simple world. Sometimes I read Chekhov's short stories. They're gentle and funny and sad."

"I am fond of Chekhov, too. To me, his writing is as unreal as a child's story. Yet it is lifelike for all that. Perhaps because there is no affectation in him."

"
A Day in the Country,
" she said musingly.

"Ah yes, that is a lovely one."

And then, for some time, both of them dozed. Sol seemed to hear and feel the throbbing, comforting vibrations of the boat even in sleep, and he forgot his age and his life for a while. Once, he woke with a smile and looked over at the woman beside him. She was breathing deeply, her full bosom rising and falling. A tiny pulse in her strong neck throbbed faintly, as though an invisible moth fluttered its wings against her flesh. A tendril of her shiny, dark blond hair swung gently against her cheek. He let his eyes grow heavy again as he faced her and he carried the sight of her into his light sleep.

Later, she woke for a minute or two and stared at his gray face, all slack with sleep. She looked at the blue numbers on his arm and she became sad. But then she convinced herself that the numbers looked fainter, that they might disappear altogether in time. She dozed again.

Late in the afternoon, they walked around the decks, exchanging little nods and smiles of amusement over the various passengers. They went inside, where there was a lunch counter. Sol bought some packages of poundcake and two containers of coffee, and they took the food out to the chairs, where they ate and talked a little and looked at the ever-changing shore.

On the return trip, their chairs faced the sunset. The water was a pink-gold, the sky washed with vermilion and purple and orange. Each cloud was outlined with fire, and the hills of the earth were deep in shadow; it was as if the passengers floated on the edge of day and night and had the choice of either.

"I've never seen a sunset like that," she said in a half-whisper.

"It is very beautiful," he said. "But somehow I do not trust its beauty, it is too blatant, too obvious."

"Sometimes the obvious can be trusted. All appearances aren't deceiving," she reprimanded gently.

"Perhaps not, but it is safer to follow the old Roman law—guilty until proved innocent," he said.

There was a low hot moon and full dark had come when he saw the lights of the city on the horizon. A massive weight settled on him.

"I fear we must stop with the make-believe," he said, gesturing toward the approaching lights. "We are approaching the hard facts."

He seemed to hear the millions of voices like the shrilling of countless animals, to smell the dirt and age and sin of the teeming city. And his sense of doom came up over him like some dark, damning clothes he had put off for the while.

"But we can do this again," she said plaintively. "There's no reason why not."

"Agh, how many times can you use a dream? It wears out so quickly against life. Never mind, it has been a pleasant, restful day. Perhaps I have regained some energy. I thank you very much," he said with cool courtesy.

She just nodded, her lips tight in the dark. She wondered if he would be able to see if she cried. It was dark enough. And he made her feel like crying. Oh, how she felt like crying!

On Monday, the day after the excursion, Sol had experienced a curious feeling of lightness, a sense of remoteness which had been quite pleasant and had coerced him to a brief idea of ease and peace.

But today, Tuesday, August 26, he recognized the limitations of reprieve. Now the past two days took on the quality of a crueler deception, and he realized he had only been made more susceptible to the formless, thrusting virulence in him.

Each dark face he encountered in the store tore at him; at times he seemed barely able to function.

His vision played tricks on him. A customer would come up to the counter and it would seem the customer's face zoomed so close that Sol could no longer see the features, was blinded by the magnified surface of human skin. A tide of succeeding skins. The brown, the tan, the red-veined, the large-pored, pimpled, and scarred world of flesh. He spoke to great walls of skin, to cracked lips, to hairy nostrils, to veinous, crusty eyes. And he tried to endure in the sounds of voices, to make understandable what he must, to compensate, like any afflicted person, by developing another sense, by decoding the scattered, at least recognizable words. And the people who had never expected anything but strangeness from him were further bewildered by his singular habit of closing his eyes and repeating, over and over, his wildly illogical offers.

"Two dollars, two dollars," he said, with his eyes shut.

"You crazy!" a voice said indignantly. "Two dollars for a Leica camera! What the hell you sayin'?"

"Two dollars."

"You flippin' you wig, Uncle, you out of your mind for sure," the voice said. And Sol never knew when the customer, whoever he was, had taken his camera and walked out of the store.

"Two dollars," he said from that self-imposed blindness.

And the woman with the pawn ticket looked at him in amazement. She had gotten a loan of fifteen dollars for gold earrings two months before and knew from experience that she should have to pay at least twenty to get them out of hock. But who was she to question a mad bargain? "Well
okay!
Here the two bucks, let's have them earrings," she said.

But Jesus Ortiz had a peculiar vested interest; for some reason beyond him, there were certain inequities he would not tolerate.

"You owe us twenty-two bucks and fifty cents, lady," he interrupted, taking the ticket from Sol as though from a sleeping man.

Sometimes, as though by lucky coincidence, the Pawnbroker made sense in his transactions. By keeping his eyes on the counter and off the faces, he was somehow able to conduct his business with a semblance of normality. Money rustled through his fingers; his hands were dulled with the handling of metal and glass and wood and cloth. But even in those times when he imitated proficiently the hard-eyed, cool appraiser, he made bad bargains.

He ran his fingers searchingly, professionally over the seams of suits and then accepted mildewed, moth-eaten garments, so it was as though his examination were merely something to satisfy some scientific curiosity, had nothing to do with gain. He posed as a crafty metallurgist, scratched and tested brass only to end up paying for gold. He knocked authoritatively at the body of a fine, handmade Italian violin and offered a minute loan on it. Then, a half hour later, he ran a bow over a cheaply made, child's practice fiddle, frowned knowingly over its shallow whine, and offered more in loan than the instrument had cost new.

And all the while, Jesus Ortiz worked at the counter near him, handling part of the traffic expertly yet always having time to look over at Sol with a strange, almost regretful calculation. His employer was going to pieces for reasons far beyond his knowledge; that was clear to him. He supposed he should take the Pawnbroker's look of impending collapse as a portent. There seemed no sense in his waiting for intangible things to decide him. He would make his move soon now. It occurred to him consciously, for the first time, that opportunity could reside in other people's destruction. And yet he wondered why he felt no promise of triumph, felt oppressed, rather, in direct proportion to his resolution. He grew impatient with himself, irritated with all the wasteful conjecture, and concentrated on eliminating nonfunctional thoughts.

He continued his dealings with the stream of supplicants, humorous with this one, brusque with another, harsh, seductive, sympathetic with others. He was facile and cool and clever, able to deal well enough with both his own customers and those the Pawnbroker almost made disastrous deals with, jumped back and forth with a dead-pan alacrity, like a man playing all the instruments in an orchestra peopled with lifelike dummies. And still, even in the presumptuousness of taking things out of his employer's hands from time to time, he managed to defend the Pawnbroker from ridiculousness, to preserve his dignity by some innate sense of diplomacy as delicate and touching as that of a son who contrives a semblance of usefulness for an aged and ineffectual father.

Under his almost instinctive protectiveness, though, his mind worked its way down a smoothly direct corridor. I will talk to Tangee tomorrow, he told himself. Now or never.

"No,
no,
Sol, that there is junk," he pointed out with impunity to the dazed Pawnbroker, who was just then pondering a cheap, toylike camera. And with that strangely gentle condescension, he nudged Sol to one side and gave the tiny loan it called for.

And Sol, lost in a world of ugly, pitiful skin, nodded at the smooth coffee-colored hide Ortiz was to him, and began occupying himself by turning the pages of the big ledger, as though searching for a route through the confounding maze.

Suddenly, in the afternoon, his vision became normal. But then it was the sound of people's voices. This was somewhat easier for him to handle. At least he was able to assay the merchandise with something like his usual expertness, to offer prices commensurate with value, and to turn down what was unreasonably demanded. There was still considerable pain in it for him, though. The voices rang in his head like gigantic bells, and he had to squint and lean forward as though to make out each tiny note in the great volume of a carillon. His expression became querulous, and his face held the lines of his straining to make sense of the crashing vibrations. He heard agonized cries in the most uninflected phrases, thunderous bellows in the tiredest sighs of acceptance.

By midafternoon he stood in the lull of an empty store, his eyes and mouth sagging, his head turning from side to side as though he were looking to see if there were any survivors besides himself.