Desperate Characters. Paula Fox

       TWO

      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 …”

      “It’s not that you ever agreed on anything—but it all seemed so set.”

      “No, we didn’t agree.”

      She exclaimed suddenly and held up her hand.

      “What is it?” he asked.

      “You brushed against it.”

      They stopped beneath a light while Otto inspected her hand.

      “It’s swollen,” he said. “Looks awful.”

      “It’s all right, just sensitive.”

      The bleeding had stopped, but a small lump had formed, pushing up the lips of the wound.

      “I think you ought to see a doctor. You ought, at least, to get a tetanus shot.”

      “What do you mean, ‘at least’?” she cried irritably.

      “Don’t be so bad-tempered.”

      They turned up Henry Street. Otto noted with satisfaction that there was as much garbage here as in their own neighborhood. He wouldn’t consider buying a house on the Heights … horribly inflated prices, all that real-estate grinning in dusty crumbling rooms—think what you could do with that woodwork!—everyone knowing it was a put-up job, greed, low belly greed, get it while we can, house prices enunciated in refined accents, mortgages like progressive diseases, “I live on the Heights.” Of course, the Bentwoods’ neighborhood was on the same ladder, frantic lest the speculators now eying property were the “wrong” kind. Otto hated realtors, hated dealing with their nasty litigations. It was the only thing he and Charlie still agreed on. He sighed, thinking of the cop who had been checking on voter registration last week, who had said to Otto, “This area is really pulling itself together, doesn’t look like the same place it was two years ago. You people are doing a job!” And Otto had felt a murderous gratification.

      “What are you sighing about?” Sophie asked.

      “I don’t know.”

      The Bentwoods had a high income. They had no children and, since they were both just over forty (Sophie was two months older than Otto), they didn’t anticipate any. They could purchase pretty much what they wanted. They had a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a house on Long Island with a long-term mortgage, which was hardly a burden any more. It sat in a meadow near the village of Flynders. Like their Brooklyn house, it was small, but it was a century older. Otto had paid for repairs out of cash reserves. In the seven years they had owned it, there had been only one disagreeable summer. That was when three homosexual men had rented a neighboring barn and played Judy Garland records all night long every night. They had set their portable record player on a cement birdbath in the old cow pasture. In moonlight or in fog, Judy Garland’s voice rang out across the meadow, driving into Otto’s head like a mailed fist. That September, he bought the barn. Someday he planned to convert it into a guest house. At present it housed the sailboat he shared with Russel.

      “I think I’ll just give the boat to Charlie,” he said as they walked up the steps to the Holsteins’ door. “I don’t even remember how much money we each put in.”

      “Where’s he going to sail it?” Sophie asked. “In the Bowery?”

      The goddamn bite had made her nervous, he thought,