Buddwing

7

He stood watching the lobby, the light streaming through a courtyard window, as she walked across it. She stopped at the elevator, unaware that he was watching her. She pushed the button, and then turned idly to look out at the street again. She saw him in startled pleasure, grinned, lifted her hand, wiggled the fingers on it, brought the hand to her lips, and threw a kiss. His heart soared. He watched as she got into the elevator, and then he did a small pirouette, and gave a short twisting jerk of his head and began walking down Park Avenue. He smiled at everyone he passed. He felt that the sky would open at any moment and shower golden coins on him, they would fall tinkling at his feet, he would wade through them and not bother to pick them up, they would clink and glitter as he walked airily through them, Jesus, she was beautiful.

Janet, Janet, Janet, her name sang in his head, plummeted to his heart like a stone dropped in a well of sweet water, echoed, echoed, Janet, Janet, Janet. Her eyes were green and deep and young and surprised and alert and questioning and new with discovery. Her hair was black and shining like a crow’s wing and a cold night and a polished seashore pebble. Janet, oh Janet — her face, delicately shaped, palely turned, the honest thrust of her nose, and the curved indentation surprised by her upper lip, the cheekbones daringly molded, the tendril of black hair escaping to lie against the jaw, the entire face in motion, eyes and nose and mouth jubilant and fresh and alive — I love you. You have tiny perfectly formed breasts; I watched your breasts beneath the black armor of your sweater. When you lifted your arm, when you put your hand beside your face with the fingers widespread in exasperation, your breasts rose and flattened for an instant, and then filled your sweater again when you lowered your arm, small and young and infinitely sweet, I love your breasts. I love your eyes, I love your hair, I love your long legs in their black tights and the promise of spring juices in you, the low chuckle in your throat, the lust that fills your green eyes, unaware. Oh my Janet, your mouth is sweet and wet and bruised by love, your lower lip is swollen with pollen. You walk with a headlong rush, there is an electric energy in you, a rhythm that gushes from your mouth in a broken Bronx college-girl jargon, that tilts your narrow hips, that drives the blossoming female bulge of you, full and achingly free beneath the black skirt. I want to touch you, I want to hold your slender naked body in my arms and touch you. I know what you are like, I know what you will be, my love, my Janet.

I need a shave, he thought.

She didn’t like the fact that I needed a shave; she said it rather petulantly, as though how dared I even attempt to pick her up when I needed a shave? But of course I wasn’t trying to pick her up; she simply reminded me of Doris. How had I ever mistaken her for Doris in the first place? Doris has brown eyes. Had. And Doris was seventeen, I can remember, certainly I can remember. So how could she possibly have been Doris, when Doris is probably as old as I am now? Doris is probably fat and sluggish and stupid — who cares about Doris? Anyway, Doris was fourteen, not seventeen.

Wait, he thought.

He seemed terribly confused all at once. His pace slackened, and for a moment he did not know where he was. He looked around him to get his bearings. Yes, this was Park Avenue; that was the old New York Central Building far down at its end, blocking the avenue, and rising above it like a majestic finger, the new Pan American Building. Yes, this was Park Avenue. How the hell could Doris have been fourteen? And who cares?

I do, he thought fiercely. I care. I did care. I cared very deeply, and that matters to me. It is important to me that I know I cared about someone and something, that... that

No, wait, he thought, please. It isn’t all gone, it really isn’t, it hasn’t all been for nothing. God why did she have to

Wait.

Please.

Wait.

I

can remember.

If you will only grant me, please, a little

time.

Please.

I desperately need a little time, only to organize my thoughts, only to prepare myself, you see, that’s all, simply to prepare myself for a life I

Grant me this, please.

“I know who Doris is,” he said aloud, fiercely. A man walking past turned to look at him, and then hurried by, glancing back once and not again. Buddwing shook his head to clear it.

She was fourteen when I met her.

That is how she can be both fourteen and seventeen. That is logical and clear, and not at all mysterious.

He moved away from the side of the building.

She was fourteen when I met her, he repeated to himself; I can remember exactly what she was wearing. She had a plaid coat, the dominant color of which was a very pale shade of lavender, and she was wearing saddle shoes that were very dirty. She looked very dirty all over, as a matter of fact, though she certainly was not; it was simply that her black hair was very wiry and always looked uncombed and also this was a time when girls were wearing very sloppy sweaters. So the effect was one of total slovenliness, though she wasn’t really dirty. She was a very clean girl. She told me that later, the time, well, that was later, the time she called me a sailor. You see, I do remember, there is nothing here I have forgotten. I have almost total recall, I can remember it all, even the buttons on the very pale lavender coat, which were rather large cloth-covered buttons, the cloth echoing the strongest color in the plaid, which was a thin square of deeper purple.

And we were going out to Coney Island; it was toward the end of the season. That’s why she was wearing the plaid coat in the morning, but she took it off later in the day, and then was wearing it again at night when we made the long ride back in strange Brooklyn subway cars until finally we transferred to the White Plains Road line, and by that time she was asleep. I wasn’t supposed to be with her — that is, she wasn’t my girl, she wasn’t even my date. The entire thing was rather confused, because we were still kids, you see. I was only fifteen, a year older than Doris, and dating was something still a little beyond our reach. This was a gang sort of thing, with my cousin Mandy.

Yes, Mandy. Why yes, Mandy.

Isn’t it odd that I can remember Mandy when I haven’t seen her... why, it must be... it must be fifteen years, twenty years? But I can remember her very clearly now with her hatchet face and her thick body and her piano legs. And of course it was Mandy, who was always running around in her stupid cheerleader sweater and leading everyone as though she were standing in a stadium somepla

I played football.

No.

But I remember something about a stadium.

I must have played.

But... it was Mandy who organized the trip to Coney Island, and I spent most of the day watching Doris, and that was the beginning of it. She didn’t seem very much interested in me. I bought her two hot dogs, but she kept walking alongside the thin fellow with the very long hair and the duck’s-ass haircut, I hated that creep. He was older. He was seventeen. I think my cousin Mandy had her eye on him. But so did Doris, and I spent thirty cents for hot dogs, a lot of good that did. She fell asleep on the way home. I asked if I could walk her to her house, but she’d already made plans with that thin lanky creep.

I must have played football.

Because I remember a plaid coat and a stadium.

If it wasn’t Doris in the plaid coat, then who was it?

Look, I’m doing very well, I really am. I remember this all very well, oh, a few odds and ends left out, I don’t... I don’t know what she called me; that seems to be the difficult part, remembering just who I was at that time, just who this boy who fell in love with Doris was or... or... I can’t remember the house I lived in or what my mother and father looked like, but I do remember her, I do remember all the heady moments of that first long love, the bicycles on the path that day... well, that, yes, that first time.

We learned each other, I suppose. We learned the mysteries through each other, the mysteries of touch. I never drew her picture the way Beethoven did with his girl, I never used that as an excuse, but we spent days in the woods together, long days when we would take the bicycles at nine o’clock in the morning, carrying picnic lunches, and spend the morning and most of the afternoon in the woods near Tibbett’s Brook. And we learned, we explored, we touched, we felt. She was my girl, you see, but more than that, she was everything female, the pulsing softness of her would sometimes leave me stunned with wonder. I can remember the first time I touched her breast, the breast of a girl, any girl — I can remember that so clearly, the pure silent shock of it. I can remember the first time she opened her blouse and showed herself to me, I can remember staring at her, and then touching her in new wonder, seeing what my hands had known for months, her eyes averted shyly, I can remember. I can remember her with enormous tenderness, I can remember almost all of the love I felt for her, the odd bright quickening of my heart whenever she came into view with that silly plaid coat and that slightly embarrassed look on her face as though her own emotions were overwhelming and somehow shameful.

It is odd how much I loved her, and yet how suddenly that love grew cold and died. There was a break so sharp and so clean that it was almost a knife thrust, a piece of clinical surgery, delicately removing the heart and holding it pulsing in the hand before dropping it in a surgical container. She was everything in the world to me, and then she was nothing. I told her on the trolley car coming back from Mount Vernon where we had gone to the Loew’s there to see a movie — I think it was Strike Up the Band with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. I think it was that, though it may have been something else; my mind was really concentrating on how I would tell her. I had discussed it that summer with L.J. and Beethoven, we had gone someplace for the summer, I don’t think Red Vest was along; no, he didn’t come into the crowd until later. But I had discussed it with the boys in the quiet dark, lying in our separate beds in the small wallpapered room. I can remember the woman who made salads, yes, we were busboys, that’s right, her name was Gladys, she was a big woman who had a son in college, she lived on Fordham Road. I can remember she got into L.J.’s bed one night, but I don’t think he did anything with her, and yet I can’t for the life of me understand why she got into his bed, had he said he was cold? I could never understand it. But I had discussed Doris with them, it seems there was another girl involved, or perhaps that was only the excuse I seized upon, perhaps it was finished with Doris long before the boys and I left for the mountains, yes, of course, it was in the Borscht Belt someplace, Goldschmidt’s Hacienda? No, that was only what we called it, well.

I told her on the trolley car. It was September; the boys and I had just come back from Goldschmidt’s. She was wearing my silver scholarship pin on the lapel of that same plaid coat, or perhaps it was a different coat, I only remember fastening my eyes to the silver high school scholarship pin. The pin made it easier to tell her. L.J. had said the best way was clean and sharp, so I kept staring at the silver pin, and I said, “There’s something I have to tell you, Doris,” but she already knew. I saw the sudden lowering of her brown eyes, and then I saw the way her hands were fluttering in her lap, and I knew she already knew, I hadn’t even kissed her in the movies, the things we used to do in the movies. “I want to break off,” I said, clean and sharp, just the way L.J. said I should do it, clean and sharp, I could feel that gleaming surgical knife sliding in between her ribs. She nodded.

“All right,” she said. She did not raise her eyes.

Clean and sharp.

Nothing is clean and sharp. I saw her again when I was home on leave from the navy, oh, it must have been two years later. Her father was a trumpet teacher, when I got to her house that day he had a kid in the living room, and the kid was running up and down his chromatic scales. I wore dress blues, and the flattop hat which I never got a chance to wear except in New York, and I had three rubbers in the elastic band behind the crest of the hat. I took her to a movie, and then parked my father’s car on a hill overlooking Ely Avenue.

I had known this girl, I had known her very well. And she stopped my hands, and said, “No. I’ve heard all about you sailors.” I took her home. I guess that was her revenge, I guess she was entitled to a small revenge after the entrance of a surgical knife on a trolley car on a bright September day. But the thing that bothered me — the real revenge, the revenge she hadn’t even intended — was not that she was denying everything we’d known together, the time we got caught in the rain and the lightning crashed in the trees around us, and we couldn’t stay dry, we were soaked to the skin waiting for the storm to pass, wanting to touch each other again, and then finally running out of the woods, and we stopped at a gas station to hide from that fearful rain, she was sixteen then, this was the spring before we broke off, and her blouse was stuck to her, the attendant watching her, I wanted to hit him, to kill him. Not the things we did, not her denial of these, not her pretending we were strangers when we were really all either of us had known up to a certain point in our lives, but... but denying me. Not the things. Me. Pretending I was only a sailor, only another sailor, she had heard all about us sailors. I was me underneath those dress blues, she had held me in her hands, she knew me, I was not a goddamn sailor, I was

I was

Tears were streaming down his face. He tried to see through the tears because he knew he had to find a barbershop, had to get a shave before he met Janet again. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands, and he thought, Well, that was long ago, that was even before Beethoven died, what the hell, why bring it up now? What’s it got to do with anything? She didn’t know who I was that night in the parked car, she thought I was some goddamn sailor, and now it’s twenty years later, however much later, and now I don’t know who I am, so what the hell difference does it make?

He saw a clock in a restaurant window. The time was 10:50. What time had Janet’s hour begun? 10:30, isn’t that what she’d said? That meant she would be out at 11:20; he had a half hour to get a shave. If he could find a barbershop.

He walked to Lexington Avenue and then made a right turn, heading downtown. He saw the barbershop in the middle of the next block, and was approaching it when his vision blurred.