All Gone

ALL GONE

He says goodbye, we kiss at the door, he rings for the elevator, I say “I’ll call you when I find out about the tickets,” he says “Anytime, as I’ll be in all day working on that book jacket I’m behind on,” waves to me as the elevator door opens and I shut the door.

I find out about the tickets and call him and he doesn’t answer. Maybe he hasn’t gotten home yet, though he usually does in half an hour. But it’s Saturday and the subway’s always much slower on weekends, and I call him half an hour later and he doesn’t answer.

He could have got home and I missed him because he right away might have gone out to buy some necessary art supply or something, and I call him an hour later and he doesn’t answer. I do warm-ups, go out and run my three miles along the river, come back and shower and call him and he doesn’t answer. I dial him every half hour after that for the next three hours and then call Operator and she checks and says his phone’s in working order.

I call his landlord and say “This is Maria Pierce, Eliot Schulter’s good friend for about the last half-year — you know me. Anyway, could you do me a real big favor and knock on his door? I know it’s an inconvenience but he’s only one flight up and you see, he should be home and doesn’t answer and I’ve been phoning and phoning him and am getting worried. I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes. If he’s in and for his own reasons didn’t want to answer the phone or it actually is out of order, could you have him call me at home?”

I call the landlord back in fifteen minutes and he says “I did what you said and he didn’t answer. That would’ve been enough for me. But you got me worried also, so I went downstairs for his duplicate keys and opened his door just a ways and yelled in for him and then walked in and he wasn’t there, though his place looked okay.”

“Excuse me, I just thought of something. Was his night light on?”

“You mean the little small-watt-bulb lamp on his fireplace mantel?”

“That’s the one. He always keeps it on at night to keep away burglars who like to jump in from his terrace.”

“What burglars jumping in from where? He was never robbed that I know.”

“The tenant before him said she was. Was it on?”

“That’s different. Yes. I thought he’d forgotten about the light, so I shut it off. I was thinking about his electricity cost, but you think I did wrong?”

“No. It only means he never got home. Thanks.”

I call every half hour after that till around six, when he usually comes to my apartment. But he never comes here without our first talking on the phone during the afternoon about all sorts of things: how our work’s going, what the mail brought, what we might have for dinner that evening and do later and if there’s anything he can pick up on the way here and so on. The concert’s at eight and I still have to pick up the tickets from my friend who’s giving them to me and can’t go herself because her baby’s sick and her husband won’t go without her. I call her and say “I don’t see how we can make the concert. Eliot’s not here, hasn’t called, doesn’t answer his phone and from what his landlord said, I doubt he ever got home after he left me this morning.”

“Does he have any relatives or close friends in the city for you to call?”

“No, he would have gone to his apartment directly — I know him. He had important work to finish, and the only close person other than myself to him is his mother in Seattle.”

“Maybe he did get home but got a very sudden call to drop everything and fly out to her, so he didn’t have the time to phone you, or when he did, your line was busy.”

“No, we’re close enough that he’d know it would worry me. He’d have called from the airport, someplace.”

“Your line still could have been busy all the times you were trying to get him. But I’m sure everything’s okay, and don’t worry about the tickets. Expensive as they are, I’ll put them down as a total loss. Though if you are still so worried about him, phone the police in his neighborhood or even his mother in Seattle.”

“Not his mother. There’s no reason and I’d just worry her and Eliot would get angry at me. But the police is a good idea.”

I call the police station in his precinct. The officer who answers says “We’ve nothing on a Mr. Schulter. But being that you say he left your apartment this morning, phone your precinct station,” and she gives me the number. I call it and the officer on duty says “Something did come in today about someone of his name — let me think.”

“Oh no.”

“Hey, take it easy. It could be nothing. I’m only remembering that I saw an earlier bulletin, but what it was went right past me. What’s your relationship to him before I start searching for it?”

“His closest friend. We’re really very very close and his nearest relative is three thousand miles from here.”

“Well, I don’t see it in front of me. I’ll locate it, though don’t get excited when I’m away. It could be nothing. I might even be wrong. It was probably more like a Mr. Fullter or Schulton I read about, but not him. Want me to phone you back?”

“I’ll wait, thanks.”

“Let me take your number anyway, just in case I get lost.”

He goes, comes back in a minute. “Now take it easy. It’s very serious. He had no I.D. on him other than this artist society card with only his signature on it, which we were checking into, so we’re grateful you called.”

“Please, what is it?”

“According to this elderly witness, he was supposedly thrown on the subway tracks this morning and killed.”

I scream, break down, hang up, pound the telephone table with my fists, the officer calls back and says “If you could please revive yourself, Miss, we’d like you to come to the police station here and then, if you could by the end of the night sometime, to the morgue to identify your friend.”

I say no, I could never go to the morgue, but then go with my best friend. She stays outside the body room when I go in, look and say “That’s him.” Later I call Eliot’s mother and the next day her brother comes to the city and takes care of the arrangements to have Eliot flown to Seattle and his apartment closed down and most of his belongings sold or given away or put on the street. The uncle asks if I’d like to attend the funeral, but doesn’t mention anything about providing air fare or where I would stay. Since I don’t have much money saved and also think I’ll be out of place there and maybe even looked down upon by his family I’ve never seen, I stay here and arrange on that same funeral day a small ceremony in the basement of a local church, where I and several of our friends and his employers speak about Eliot and read aloud excerpts of his letters to a couple of us and listen to parts of my opera records he most liked to play and for a minute bow our heads, hold hands and pray.

According to that elderly witness, Eliot was waiting for a train on the downtown platform of my stop when he saw a young man speaking abusively to a girl of about fifteen. When the girl continued to ignore him, he made several obscene gestures and said he was going to throw her to the platform and force her to do all sorts of sordid things to him and if he couldn’t get her to do them there because people were watching, then in the men’s room upstairs. The girl was frightened and started to walk away. The young man grabbed her wrist, started to twist it, stopped and said he would rip her arm off if she gave him a hard time, but didn’t let go. There were a few people on the platform. Nobody said anything or tried to help her and in fact all of them except Eliot and this elderly man eventually moved to the other end of the platform or at least away from what was going on. Then Eliot went over to the young man, who was still holding the girl by her wrist, and very politely asked him to let her alone. Something like “Excuse me, I don’t like to interfere in anyone’s problems. But if this young lady doesn’t want to be bothered by you, then I would really think you’d let her go.”

“Listen, I know her, so mind your business,” the young man said and she said to Eliot “No he don’t.” Then out of nowhere a friend of the young man ran down the subway stairs and said to him “What’s this chump doing, horning in on your act?” The elderly man got up from a bench and started for the upstairs to get help. “You stay right here, grandpa,” the first young man said, “or you’ll get thrown on your back too.” The elderly man stopped. Eliot said to the young men “Please, nobody should be getting thrown on their backs. And I hate to get myself any more involved in this, but for your own good you fellows ought to go now or just leave everybody here alone.”

“And for your own good,” one of the young men said, “you’d be wiser moving your ass out of here.”

“I can only move it once I know this girl’s out of danger with you two.”

“She’ll be plenty out of danger when you move your ass out of here, now move.”

“Believe me, I’d like to, but how can I? Either you leave her completely alone now or I’ll have to get the police.”

That’s when they jumped him, beat him to the ground and, when he continued to fight back with his feet, fists and butting his head, picked him up and threw him on the tracks. He landed on his head and cracked his skull and something like a blood clot suddenly shot through to the brain, a doctor later said. The girl had already run away. The young men ran the opposite way. The elderly man shouted at Eliot to get up, then at people to jump down to the tracks to help Eliot up, then ran in the direction the young men went to the token booth upstairs and told the attendant inside that an unconscious man was lying on the tracks and for her to do something quick to prevent a train from running over him. She phoned from the booth. He ran back to the platform and all the way to the other end of it yelling to the people around him “Stop the train. Man on the tracks, stop the local train.” When the downtown local entered the station a minute later, he and most of the people along the platform screamed and waved the motorman to stop the train because someone was on the tracks. The train came to a complete stop ten feet from Eliot. A lot of the passengers were thrown to the floor and the next few days a number of them sued the city for the dizzy spells and sprained fingers and ripped clothes they said they got from the sudden train stop and also for the days and weeks they’d have to miss from their jobs because of their injuries. Anyway, according to that same doctor who examined Eliot at the hospital, he was dead a second or two after his head hit the train rail.

For a week after the funeral I go into my own special kind of mourning: seeing nobody, never leaving the apartment or answering phone calls, eating little and drinking too much, but mostly just sleeping or watching television while crying and lying in bed. Then I turn the television off, answer every phone call, run along the river for twice as many miles than I usually do, go out for a big restaurant dinner with a friend and return to my job.

The Saturday morning after the next Saturday after that I sit on the bench near the place on the subway platform where Eliot was thrown off. I stay there from eight to around one, on the lookout for the two young men. I figure they live in the neighborhood and maybe every Saturday have a job or something to go to downtown and after a few weeks they’ll think everything’s forgotten about them and their crime and they can go safely back to their old routines, like riding the subway to work at the station nearest their homes. The descriptions I have of them are the ones the elderly witness gave. He said he was a portrait painter or used to be and so he was absolutely exact about their height, age, looks, mannerisms and hair color and style and clothes. He also made detailed drawings of the men for the police, which I have copies of from the newspaper, and which so far haven’t done the police any good in finding them.

What I’m really looking out for besides those descriptions are two young men who will try and pick up or seriously annoy or molest a teenage girl on the platform or do that to any reasonably young woman, including me. If I see them and I’m sure it’s them I’ll summon a transit policeman to arrest them and if there’s none around then I’ll follow the young men, though discreetly, till I see a policeman. And if they try and molest or terrorize me on the bench and no policeman’s around, I’ll scream at the top of my lungs till someone comes and steps in, and hopefully a policeman. But I just want those two young men caught, that’s all, and am willing to risk myself a little for it, and though there’s probably not much chance of it happening, I still want to give it a good try.

I do this every Saturday morning for months. I see occasional violence on the platform, like a man slapping his woman friend in the face or a mother hitting her infant real hard, but nothing like two or even one man of any description close to those young men terrorizing or molesting a woman or girl or even trying to pick one up. I do see men, both old and young, and a few who look no more than nine years old or ten, leer at women plenty as if they’d like to pick them up or molest them. Some men, after staring at a woman from a distance, then walk near to her when the train comes just to follow her through the same door into the car. But that’s as far as it goes on the platform. Maybe when they both get in the car and especially when it’s crowded, something worse happens. I know that a few times a year when I ride the subway, a pull or poke from a man has happened to me.

A few times a man has come over to the bench and once even a woman who looked manly and tried to talk to me, but I brushed them off with silence or a remark. Then one morning a man walks over when I’m alone on the bench and nobody else is around. I’m not worried, since he has a nice face and is decently dressed and I’ve seen him before here waiting for the train and all it seems he wants now is to sit down. He’s a big man, so I move over a few inches to the far end of the bench to give him more room.

“No,” he says, “I don’t want to sit — I’m just curious. I’ve seen you in this exact place almost every Saturday for the last couple of months and never once saw you get on the train. Would it be too rude—”

“Yes.”

“All right. I won’t ask it. I’m sorry.”

“No, go on, ask it. What is it you want to know? Why I sit here? Well I’ve been here every Saturday for more than three months straight, if you’re so curious to know, and why you don’t see me get on the car is none of your business, okay?”

“Sure,” he says, not really offended or embarrassed. “I asked for and got it and should be satisfied. Excuse me,” and he walks away and stands near the edge of the platform, never turning around to me. When the local comes, he gets on it.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been that sharp with him, but I don’t like to be spoken to by men I don’t know, especially in subways.

Next Saturday around the same time he comes downstairs again and stops by my bench.

“Hello,” he says.

I don’t say anything and look the other way. “Still none of my business why you sit here every Saturday like this?”

I continue to look the other way.

“I should take a hint, right?”

“Do you think that’s funny?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want me to do, call a policeman?”

“Of course not. I’m sorry and I’m being stupid.”

“Look, I wouldn’t call a policeman. You seem okay. You want to be friendly or so it seems. You’re curious besides, which is good. But to me it is solely my business and not yours why I sit here and don’t want to talk to you and so forth and I don’t know why you’d want to persist in it.”

“I understand,” and he walks away, stays with his back to me and gets on the train when it comes.

Next Saturday he walks down the stairs and stays near the platform edge about ten feet away reading a book. Then he turns to me and seems just about to say something and I don’t know what I’m going to say in return, if anything, because he does seem polite and nice and intelligent and I actually looked forward a little to seeing and speaking civilly to him, when the train comes. He waves to me and gets on it. I lift my hand to wave back but quickly put it down. Why start?

Next Saturday he runs down the stairs to catch the train that’s pulling in. He doesn’t even look at me this time, so in a rush is he to get on the car. He gets past the doors just before they close and has his back to me when the train leaves. He must be late for someplace.

The next Saturday he comes down the stairs and walks over to me with two containers of coffee or tea while the train’s pulling in. He keeps walking to me while the train doors open, close, and the train goes. I look at the advertisement clock. He’s about fifteen minutes earlier than usual.

“How do you like your coffee if I can ask, black or regular? Or maybe you don’t want any from me, if you do drink coffee, which would of course be all right too.”

“Regular, but I don’t want any, thanks.”

“Come on, take it, it’s not toxic and I can drink my coffee any old way. And it’ll perk you up, not that you need perking up and certainly not from me,” and he gives me a container. “Sugar?” and I say “Really, this is—” and he says “Come on: sugar?” and I nod and he pulls out of his jacket pocket a couple of sugar packets and a stirring stick. “I just took these on the way out of the shop without waiting for a bag, don’t ask me why. The stick’s probably a bit dirty, do you mind?” and I shake my head and wipe the stick though there’s nothing on it. “Mind if I sit and have my coffee also?” and I say “Go ahead. It’s not my bench and all that and I’d be afraid to think what you’d pull out of your pocket if I said no — probably your own bench and cocktail table,” and he says “Don’t be silly,” and sits.

He starts talking about the bench, how the same oak one has been here for at least thirty years because that’s how long he’s lived in the neighborhood, then about the coffee, that it’s good though always from the shop upstairs a little bitter, then why he happens to see me every Saturday: that he’s recently divorced and has a child by that marriage who he goes to in Brooklyn once a week to spend the whole day with. He seems even nicer and more intelligent than I thought and comfortable to be with and for the first time I think he’s maybe even good-looking when before I thought his ears stuck out too far and he had too thin a mouth and small a nose. He dresses well anyway and has a nice profile and his hair’s stylish and neat and his face shaven clean which I like and no excessive jewelry or neck chain which I don’t and in his other jacket pocket are a paperback and small ribbon-wrapped package, the last I guess a present for his little girl.

His train comes and when the doors open I say “Shouldn’t you get on it?” and he says “I’ll take the next one if you don’t mind,” and I say “I don’t think it’s up to me to decide,” and he hunches his shoulders and gives me that expression “Well I don’t know what to say,” and the train goes and when it’s quiet again he continues the conversation, now about what I think of something that happened in Africa yesterday which he read in the paper today. I tell him I didn’t read it and that maybe when I do read my paper it won’t be the same as his and so might not have that news story and he says “What paper you read?” and I tell him and he says “Same one — front page, left-hand column,” and I say “Anyway, on Saturdays I don’t, and for my own reasons, have time for the newspaper till I get home later and really also don’t have the time to just sit here and talk,” and he says “Of course, of course,” but seriously, as if he believes me, and we’re silent for a while, drinking our coffees and looking at the tracks.

We hear another train coming and I say “I think you better get on this one,” and he says “Okay. It’s been great and I hope I haven’t been too much of a nuisance,” and I say “You really haven’t at all,” and he says “Mind if I ask your name?” and I say “Your train,” and he yells to the people going into the subway car “Hold the door,” and gets up and says to me “Mine’s Vaughn,” and shakes my hand and says “Next week,” and runs to the train with his container and he’s not past the door a second when the man who kept it open for him lets it close.

I picture him on his way to Brooklyn, reading his book, later in Prospect Park with his daughter as he said they would do if the good weather holds up and in an indoor ice-skating rink if it doesn’t, and then go back to my lookout. People spit and throw trash on the tracks, a drunk or crazy man urinates on the platform, a boy defaces the tile wall with a marker pen and tells me to go shoot myself when I very politely suggest he stop, there’s almost a fight between a man trying to get off the train and the one blocking his way who’s trying to get on, which I doubt would have happened if both sides of the double door had opened, but again no sign of my two young men.

Vaughn’s not there the next Saturday and the Saturday after that and the third Saturday he’s not there I begin thinking that I’m thinking more about him than I do of anybody or thing and spending more time looking at the staircase and around the platform for him than I do for those young men. I’ve gradually lost interest in finding them and over the last four months my chances have gotten worse and worse that I’ll even recognize them if they ever do come down here and as far as their repeating that harassing-the-girl incident at this particular station, well forget it, and I leave the station at noon instead of around my usual two and decide that was my last Saturday there.

A month later I meet Vaughn coming out of a supermarket when I’m going in. He’s pulling a shopping cart filled with clean laundry at the bottom and two big grocery bags on top. It’s Saturday, we’re both dressed in T-shirts and shorts for the warm weather now, and I stop him by saying “Vaughn, how are you?” He looks at me as if he doesn’t remember me. “Maybe because you can’t place me anywhere else but on a subway bench. Maria Pierce. From the subway station over there.”

“That’s right. Suddenly your face was familiar, but you never gave me your name. What’s been happening?” and I say “Nothing much I guess,” and he says “You don’t wait in subway stations anymore for whatever you were waiting for those days?” and I say “How would you know? You stopped coming yourself there and to tell you the truth I was sort of looking forward to a continuation of that nice chat we last had.”

“Oh, let me tell you what went wrong. My ex-wife, giving me a day’s notice, changed jobs and locations and took my daughter to Boston with her. I could have fought it, but don’t like arguments. I only get to see her when I get up there, which hasn’t happened yet, and maybe for August if I want.”

“That’s too bad. I remember how devoted you were.”

“I don’t know it’s so bad. I’m beginning to enjoy my freedom every Saturday, as much as I miss my kid. But I got to go. Ice cream in the bag will soon be melting,” and he says goodbye and goes.

If I knew his last name I might look him up in the phone book and call him and say something like “Since we live in the same neighborhood, would you care to have a cup of coffee one of these days? I owe you one and I’ll even, if you’re still curious, let you in on my big secret why I every Saturday for months waited at our favorite subway station.” Then I think no, even if I did have his phone number. I gave him on the street a couple of openings to make overtures about seeing me again and he didn’t take them because he didn’t want to or whatever his reasons but certainly not because of his melting ice cream.

Several weeks later I read in the newspaper that those two young men got caught. They were in the Eighth Street subway station and tried to molest a policewoman dressed like an artist with even a sketchbook and drawing pen, and two plain-clothes-men were waiting nearby. The police connected them up with Eliot’s death. The two men later admitted to being on my subway platform that day but said they only started a fight with him because he tried to stop one of them from making a date with a girl the young man once knew. They said they told Eliot to mind his business, he refused, so they wrestled him to the ground and then said he could get up if he didn’t make any more trouble. Eliot said okay, got up and immediately swung at them, missed, lost his footing and before either of them could grab him away, fell to the tracks. They got scared and ran to the street. They don’t know the girl’s last name or where she lives except that it’s somewhere in the Bronx.

I buy all the newspapers that day and the next. One of them has a photo of the young men sticking their middle fingers up to the news photographers. They don’t look anything like the young men I was on the lookout for, so either the witness’s description of them or the printing of the photograph was bad, because I don’t see how they could have physically changed so much in just a few months.

I continue to read the papers for weeks after that, hoping to find something about the young men going to trial, but don’t. Then a month later a co-worker of mine who knew about Eliot and me says she saw on the television last night that the young men were allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of negligent manslaughter or something and got off with a jail term of from one to three years. “It seems the elderly man, that main witness to Eliot’s murder, died of a fatal disease a while ago and the young woman witness could never be found. As for molesting the policewoman, that charge was dropped, though the news reporter never said why.”