Desperate Characters

“You’ve been together such a long time. Why have you come to this now?”

“I don’t care for the new people he’s taken up with, the clients. I know what’s always gone on in the office. I’ve done the tiresome work while Charlie’s put on his funny hats and knocked everybody dead with personal charm. His whole act has consisted in denying the law is anything but an ironic joke, and that goes far with a lot of people.”

“It will be hard to see them. Don’t you think it will? Ruth and I’ve never been close friends, but we managed. How do you just stop seeing people? What about the boat?”

“You just stop, that’s how. The winter has been so bad. You can’t imagine the people in the waiting room, a beggar’s army. He told me today that some of his clients were intimidated by the grandeur of our office, that they’ll be more comfortable in his new place. Then he said I’d dry up and disappear if I didn’t, in his words, tune in on the world. God! You should hear him talk, as though he’d been sanctified! One of his clients accused the receptionist of being racist because she asked him to use an ashtray instead of grinding his cigarette butt out in the rug. And today, two men like comic-strip spies helped him pack his goddamn cartons. No, we won’t be seeing them and he can have the boat. I’ve never cared that much about it. Really, it’s just been a burden.”

Sophie winced as she felt a thrust of sharp pain. He frowned at her and she saw that he thought she hadn’t liked what he had said. She’d tell him now, might as well. The incident with the cat was silly. At a distance of half an hour, she wondered at the terror she’d felt, and the shame.

“The cat scratched me,” she said. He got up at once and walked around the table to her.

“Let me see.”

She held up her hand. It was hurting. He touched it delicately, and his face showed solicitude. It flashed through her mind that he was sympathetic because the cat had justified his warning against it.

“Did you wash it? Did you put something on it?”

“Yes, yes,” she answered impatiently, watching the blood seep through the paper, thinking to herself that if the bleeding would stop, that would be an end to it.

“Well, I’m sorry, darling. But it wasn’t a good idea to feed it.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“Does it hurt?”

“A little. Like an insect bite.”

“Just take it easy for a while. Read the paper.”

He cleared the table, put the dishes in the dishwasher, scraped the remaining livers into a bowl and set the casserole to soak. As he went about his work, he caught glimpses of Sophie, sitting up very straight, the newspaper on her lap. He was curiously touched by her uncharacteristic immobility. She appeared to be listening for something, waiting.

Sophie sat in the living room and stared at the front page of the newspaper. Her hand had begun to throb. It was only her hand, she told herself, yet the rest of her body seemed involved in a way she couldn’t understand. It was as though she’d been vitally wounded.

Otto walked into the living room. “What are you going to wear?” he asked her cheerfully.

“That Pucci dress,” she said, “although I think I’ve put on too much weight for it.” She got up. “Otto, why did it bite me? I was petting it.”

“I thought you said it just scratched you.”

“Whatever it did … but why did it attack me so?” They walked to the staircase. The mahogany banister glowed in the soft buttery light of a Victorian bubble-glass globe which hung from the ceiling. She and Otto had worked for a week taking off the old black paint from the banister. It was the first thing they had done together after they had bought the house.

“Because it’s savage,” he said. “Because all it wanted from you was food.” He put his foot on the first step and said, as if to himself, “I’ll be better off by myself.”

“You’ve always had your own clients,” she said irritably, clenching and unclenching her hurt hand. “I don’t see why you couldn’t keep on together.”

“All that melodrama … I can’t live with that. And he couldn’t leave it alone. If I wasn’t with him, I was against him. I don’t mean to say there isn’t cause. I don’t mean to say there’s any kind of justice in the world. But I know Charlie. He’s using those people and their causes. He just doesn’t want to be left out. And I want to be left out. Oh … it was time it all ended. We’ve used each other up. The truth is, I don’t like him any more.”

“I wonder how he feels?”

“Like Paul Muni, defending the unlovely and unloved. There never were such lawyers. Do you remember? All those movies in the thirties? The young doctors and lawyers going to the sticks and edifying all the rubes?”

“Paul Muni! Charlie’s right,” she said. “You’re barely in the right century.”

“That’s true.”

“But Charlie is not bad!” she exclaimed.

“I didn’t say he was bad. He’s irresponsible and vain and hysterical. Bad hasn’t anything to do with it.”

“Irresponsible! What do you mean, irresponsible!”

“Shut up!” said Otto. He put his arms around her.

“Look out!” she said. “I’ll get blood on you!”

TWO (#ulink_45305ddf-28f4-5985-be88-64250e5e404c)

A few feet from the bottom step, Otto paused and turned, as he habitually did, to look back at his home. He was drawn toward it. He yearned to throw open the door he had only just locked, to catch the house empty. It was, he thought, a little like the wish to be sentient at one’s own funeral.

With one or two exceptions, each of the houses on the Bentwoods’ block was occupied by one family. All of the houses had been built during the final third of the last century, and were of brick or brownstone. Where the brick had been cleaned, a chalky pink glow gave off an air of antique serenity. Most front parlor windows were covered with white shutters. Where owners had not yet been able to afford them, pieces of fabric concealed the life within behind the new panes of glass. These bits of cloth, even though they were temporary measures, had a certain style, a kind of forethought about taste, and were not at all like the rags that hung over the windows of the slum people. What the owners of the street lusted after was recognition of their superior comprehension of what counted in this world, and their strategy for getting it combined restraint and indirection.

One boardinghouse remained in business, but the nine tenants were very quiet, almost furtive, like the last remaining members of a foreign enclave who, daily, expect deportation.

The neighborhood eyesore was a house covered with yellow tile. An Italian family that had lived on the block during its worst days, finally moving out the day after all the street lamps had been smashed, was held responsible for this breach of taste.

The maple trees planted by the neighborhood association the year before were beginning to bud. But the street was not well lighted yet, and despite phone calls, letters, and petitions to City Hall and the local precinct, policemen were rarely glimpsed, except in patrol cars on their way to the slum people. At night, the street had a quiet earnest look, as though it were continuing to try to improve itself in the dark.

There was still refuse everywhere, a tide that rose but barely ebbed. Beer bottles and beer cans, liquor bottles, candy wrappers, crushed cigarette packs, caved-in boxes that had held detergents, rags, newspapers, curlers, string, plastic bottles, a shoe here and there, dog feces. Otto had once said, staring disgustedly at the curb in front of their house, that no dog had deposited that.

“Do you suppose they come here to shit at night?” he had asked Sophie.

She hadn’t replied, only giving him a sidelong glance that was touched with amusement. What would he have said, she wondered, if she had told him that his question had reminded her of a certain period in her childhood when moving the bowels, as her mother called it, was taken up by Sophie and her friends as an outdoor activity, until they were all caught in a community squat beneath a lilac bush? Sophie had been shut into the bathroom for an hour, in order, her mother had said, to study the proper receptacle for such functions.

The Holsteins lived in Brooklyn Heights on Henry Street, ten blocks from the Bentwoods. Otto didn’t want to take the car and lose his parking space, and although Sophie did not feel up to walking—she was vaguely nauseated—she didn’t want to insist on being driven. Otto would think the cat bite had affected her more than it really had. It was usually more costly to make a fool of oneself, she thought. Her fatuity had deserved at least a small puncture.

“Why do they drop everything on the pavement?” Otto asked angrily.

“It’s the packaging. Wrapping frenzy.”

“It’s simple provocation. I watched a colored man kick over a trash basket yesterday. When it rolled out into the street, he put his hands on his hips and roared with laughter. This morning I saw that man who hangs the blanket outside his window standing on his bed and pissing out into the yard.”

A car in low gear passed; a window slid down and a hand gently released a ball of Kleenex. Sophie began to laugh. “Americans …” muttered Otto, “softly dropping their turds wherever they go.”

They crossed Atlantic Avenue and started west, passing the Arab shops with their windows full of leather cushions and hookahs, the Arab bakeries which smelled of sesame paste. A thin Eastern wail slid out of a store no bigger than a closet. Inside, three men were staring down at a hand-operated record player. Sophie paused in front of a Jordanian restaurant, where the Bentwoods had dined with Charlie Russel and his wife only last week. Looking past the flaking gold letters on the glass, she saw the table they had sat at.

“How is it possible? It all seemed so friendly that night,” she said softly.

“It was. When we first decided to end the partnership, it was friendlier than it ever had been. But this week …”