Death Wish

7

On Thursday Carol was hospitalized at Columbia-Presbyterian for observation; at least that was what the psychiatrist called it.

By Thursday morning Paul had begun to realize how dangerous it was to coop himself up alone. The longer he spent in the apartment the more terrifying the outside world became. He had to bestir himself. It was too easy to seal himself off, stare at imbecilic television programs and blank walls. Drinking more than he ate. Getting no exercise at all. He kept thinking he was having heart attacks.

Except for the hours when he tried to sleep he avoided the bedroom. It was too full of Esther. He knew he should pack her things and get rid of them but he didn’t want to go near them yet so he confined himself to the living room, the kitchen, the foyer; sometimes striding back and forth from one to the other but usually sitting blankly in front of the television console whether it was turned on or not.

He had only been out of the apartment three times on brief excursions in the past one hundred hours. That was no good. The body rotted, the mind deteriorated; only the demons of subconscious fantasies thrived.

He decided to call Sam Kreutzer at the office and take Sam up on the invitation to dinner if it was still open; he prepared himself for the possibility that Sam and his wife would have some other engagement for tonight, and reached for the phone.

It rang before he touched it. Jack, to tell him about Carol’s hospitalization.

Paul didn’t remember the conversation clearly afterward. He knew he had shouted at Jack — damn fool questions to which Jack couldn’t possibly have the answers; cruel inane accusations that only succeeded in eliciting chilly replies from Jack. Finally Jack hung up on him.

He hadn’t even got the psychiatrist’s name. He would have to call back and get it. But not right away; he had to give Jack time to cool off first — and give himself time for the same thing.

He showered — scrubbed himself viciously until the flesh stung with a red rash. Shaved with meticulous care. Got into a completely clean set of clothes from the skin out for the first time in five days. His best office suit — the gray gabardine Esther had insisted he buy in the Oxford Street shop the last time they had been to London, three years ago. He knotted his tie precisely and fixed it to his shirt with the silver tiepin. Wiped off his shoes with a rag. Checked himself in the mirror, re-combed his hair, and braced himself to walk out the door.

In front of the building splinters of shattered glass lay like frost on the sidewalk — a broken bottle. He stepped around it and looked both ways for traffic and jaywalked across to the east side of the avenue. When he walked up Seventieth toward Broadway the children were leaving P.S. 199, making a racket, traveling in packs and knots. His stomach muscles knotted. At first he didn’t look any of them in the face — as if by pretending they didn’t exist he could prevent them from seeing him. He let them flow around him. There was a lot of rough-edged laughter in high voices. Did it have a savage brutal ring to it or was he only hearing it that way?

As he forged into the midst of the yelling mass he suddenly began looking them straight in the faces. In his pocket his fist closed around the knotted sock, weighted with its roll of coins.

One tall youth caught Paul’s glance. The youth’s eyes flickered when they touched Paul’s: flickered and slid away. Paul almost stopped. His head swiveled to follow the youth, who said something to the kid beside him; they both laughed but they didn’t look back in Paul’s direction.

He had the light at the corner; he trotted across Amsterdam and was stopped by the light at Broadway so he turned right on the curb and began to walk toward Columbus Circle. He was out of the packs of kids now; his gut relaxed. But his thoughts raced: what had he expected? To be attacked in the midst of a street crowded with schoolchildren? To get into a stare-down match with that tall youth, and come to blows?

You have got to get hold of yourself.

He approached the clean attractive buildings of the Lincoln Center complex. A sudden impulse sent him across Broadway on Sixty-fifth and he went into Central Park, heading across town.

Just inside the park a bum staggered near with palm outstretched; and Paul, who had always felt obliged to pay off the infirm ones, hurried past with his face averted.

The park was covered with the leavings of callous humanity: discarded newspapers, crumpled lunch bags, rusty bottlecaps, rustless empty cans, broken bottles. Several years ago he had worked an entire summer, every spare hour of it, for the volunteer anti-litter campaign. All right, they’ve been told, they’ve had their chance.

He didn’t follow the implications of the thought through: he was afraid to.

Near the zoo a drunk sat swaying on a bench. His eyes tracked Paul. He looked as if he had no past and was entitled to no future. He kept watching Paul, his head turning to follow Paul’s passage. It set Paul’s teeth on edge. He hurried through the zoo and out onto Fifth Avenue.

He had started with no particular destination, only an urge to get out, get moving, put an end to his unhealthy isolation. By now he knew where he was heading. He quickened his pace even though his feet were beginning to get hot and sore.

The door sucked shut behind him. Marilyn the receptionist, who was a matronly twenty-six-year-old brunette with the suggestion of a double chin, did a double-take that contrived to combine in one expression amazement, pleasure and sympathy. “Why Mr. Benjamin!” she chirped. “How nice!” Then she remembered; her face changed with comic abruptness. “Oh we were all so frightfully sorry to hear ... Poor Mrs. Benjamin ... It must have been just terrible for you—”

He nodded and muttered something and hurried through the corridor door before she could take a notion to suffocate him protectively against her big soft bosom.

He went along to Sam Kreutzer’s office and got a similar reception from Sam’s secretary; when he went into the office Dundee was with Sam. They were both effusive; it was a while before he could get a word in. “I was getting cabin fever. Thought I’d come back to work. I’m probably not much good for anything yet but it might help just to sit there and push papers around.”

“I think you’re dead right,” Dundee said. “At least you’ll have some friendly faces for company.”

He steadied himself against the banal predictability of their throat-clearing and face-rearranging. Sam said, “Hell, Paul.”

Dundee gripped his arm with one hand and patted his shoulder with the other. “It always takes a while, fella, but we’re all a hundred percent with you. Anything you need, anything at all...”

“It’s okay, Bill.” He endeavored to lighten things: “Actually, Sam, if that invitation’s still open, the one thing I think I really need more than anything else is a square meal. I’ve been living on frozen food — TV dinners that taste like reruns.”

He wasn’t sure if he imagined it: the briefest discomfiture on Sam’s face? But a smile chased it away. “You bet, Paul. I’ll call herself and tell her to set a place.”

It bothered him: was Sam really chagrined? Did he feel it would be awkward? Maybe Paul shouldn’t have asked...

“I know exactly what you mean,” Dundee was saying. “That time Anne was in the hospital, the kids all away at school — I was never so happy as when she got home and on her feet again. I suppose it makes me a male chauvinist pig, but I swear to God they bulk that frozen dreck with sawdust and cast-iron filings.”

A smell was bothering Paul; sicksweet and thick. He finally ascertained it was Dundee’s barber-shave.

Dundee’s smile had gone rigid — as if he had jut realized his anecdote had been misplaced. Anne had come home from the hospital after her operation. Esther would never come home again. It was what Dundee was thinking: he always wore his thoughts on his face: and Paul couldn’t think of a way to dispel Dundee’s guilt without making things even more tedious and awkward than they were already. The best thing to do was overlook it, pretend he was oblivious to it, press on. He said as quickly as he could, “I began to get the very distinct feeling things around here were starting to fall apart in my absence. So I have returned. Partly to see whose fingers I might catch in the cookie jar” — a laugh, too loud and hearty, from Dundee — “and partly to start undoing all the damage you guys must have been doing to my clients’ affairs.”

Sam Kreutzer said, “As a matter of fact we were talking over one of your clients just now when you came in. Nemserman. Son of a bitch really got his tail caught in a crack, didn’t he.”

“Has he been bugging you?”

“He calls every day or two, wanting to know how soon you’ll be back in harness. He told me to convey his sympathies, by the way.”

Paul wondered if that was true. He doubted it; Nemserman lacked that brand of consideration. Probably Sam had made it up on the spur of the moment because it was something that ought to be said.

Dundee said, “I talked to him yesterday — Sam was out when he called. He must’ve been calling from some bookie joint — the background noise was unbelievable.”

“What’d he have to say?”

“Number one, when was Paul Benjamin going to quit sitting on his ass and get back to work. I’m quoting more or less verbatim. Number two, he seems to have learned a lesson — temporarily anyway — from getting stung on that unearned income he thought was a capital gain. He instructed his broker to double-check back with him for six-month spans every time he takes a notion to sell a block of stock. Number three, he said this problem has brought to mind another difficulty and he wanted to discuss it.”

“And did he?”

“Well, yes. I don’t mean to get sly with your clients, Paul — I’ve put all of them off, I’m not trying to steal your people away from you. But Nemserman’s been hot under the collar for the past week. I finally broke down and gave him the advice he was looking for.”

“Advice about what?”

“Well, he’s got a suitcase full of blue-chips he’s had for a thousand years. I mean he’s been holding some of the damn things since Roosevelt’s first administration.”

“Franklin,” Sam Kreutzer said drily, “or Teddy?”

Dundee said, “If he sells the things now, of course, he’ll have to pay a whopping capital gains tax on the increment. Some of those things have gone up in the past forty years, counting splits and stock dividends, from ten dollars to six hundred dollars. He was desperate to find a way to avoid paying out all that loot.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“Told him to establish some trusts and sink the stocks into the trusts. Then just hang on to them. If he keeps them until he dies they’ll pass on to his heirs, and the heirs can sell it without paying capital gains tax. And if he puts the stocks in trust for his heirs, it’ll help get around some of the estate taxes.”

Dundee was talking too much and too fast. Paul tried to set him at ease. “That’s exactly what I’d have told him, Bill. Don’t worry about it. I don’t think he’ll take your advice anyway, but at least he won’t be able to complain later that we fouled him up.”

Sam Kreutzer said, “Why won’t he do it?”

“Far as I know he’s only got two heirs — a sister and a nephew — and he hates their guts.”

“Then why doesn’t he set up a charitable foundation?”

“I’ve been trying to talk him into that for years. He keeps saying he’ll get around to it. He never will. Hasn’t got a charitable bone in his body.”

“So he’ll leave it all to two people he hates, and let the Government grab most of it on inheritance taxes. Well, I doubt he gives a damn what happens to it after he’s dead. It’s all monopoly money to guys like Nemserman. It’s the way they keep score in the games they play. Once Nemserman dies and the game ends, who cares what happens to the chips?”

Dundee said, “I wish I could afford to look at it that way.”

Paul settled into a chair. “Maybe he’s right. There are times I’m convinced there’s nothing more to existence in this world than a black desert where blind people pick up rocks and grope around to kill one another.”

He hadn’t meant to get onto that; it had been on the back of his tongue and he had let it slip out. When he saw how they reacted to it he regretted having spoken. Dundee was suddenly busy trying to find a neutral corner on which to settle his attention and Sam Kreutzer fixed his stare against the knot of Paul’s necktie and said, “Well sure, Paul, I guess we know how you feel. I imagine things will look a little less bleak to you as time goes by.”

“I doubt it,” Paul said — evenly, without force; he didn’t want to get into a heated dispute but he felt there were things inside him that needed airing. “Remember that piece in the Sunday Times Magazine? We read those things all the time but we don’t really buy them. You don’t believe these things actually happen — not until they happen to you personally.”

“You can’t blame people, Paul. They’re exposed to it night and day — they get jaded with it. It’s like crying ‘wolf’ — people hear about crime in the streets so often and so regularly that it ceases to have any meaning for them. And maybe that’s a good thing. We all need some kind of defense mechanism — otherwise we’d all be stark raving mad.”

Carol...

Deliberately he forced himself forward. “Sam, it’s got to have some kind of effect when you read how even seeing-eye dogs are having nervous breakdowns from the strain of living in this city. They’re knifing policemen right in the precinct squad rooms — doesn’t it mean something that in the city of New York you can’t walk into some police stations without ringing the doorbell and waiting to be buzzed in?”

“Why do you think we’re trying to find a place to live outside the city?” Sam’s implication was clear.

“Maybe that’s the answer, I don’t know. Maybe... maybe Esther would still be...”

“Oh Christ, Paul, try to take it easy, will you?”

“I’m all right. I’m not about to break down all over your carpet, Sam. It’s just that I’ve been doing a lot of reconsidering these last few days. It’s not easy to realize that you just may have dedicated a good part of your life to a group of causes that turn out to be dead wrong.”

Sam shook his head. “I can’t believe that, Paul — and neither will you when you’ve had time to settle down and put this vicious thing behind you.”

The conversation wasn’t continued until that evening because Paul’s reply was cut off by the arrival in Sam’s office of Henry Ives, the senior partner. “Marilyn told us you’d come in. Glad to see you, Paul — glad to see you.”

Paul shook the knobby old hand. The rigidity of Ives’s coin-slot mouth was a clue to his unease. “I can’t tell you how sorry we all are over this terrible thing, Paul — sorry and angry. Angry right down to the soles of my feet, to tell you the truth. The fact that our so-called public servants allow these things to happen and keep allowing them to happen over and over again” — he drew a shuddering long breath to continue — “it’s a source of bitter shame to all of us, Paul. Do they know anything about these hoodlums? I understand they haven’t caught them yet. A disgrace, an utter disgrace.”

The shift in topics almost caught Paul unawares; once Ives launched into a set-piece speech he almost invariably continued at length until it had run its course: Ives held himself with the religious fervor of the passionate egoist and all his posturings and attitudes were long and well rehearsed.

“No,” Paul said, “they haven’t turned them up yet. They’re still working on it. I’ve been keeping in touch with the police. They do have one or two leads.”

“Well by God they’d better act on them. I understand it was a group of young ones — teen-age thugs, is that right?”

“Apparently so.”

“A disgrace,” Ives said again, and held up a finger as if to forestall an interruption, which no one had offered. “These young scum grow up in a welfare state where they see that violence goes unpunished and the old virtues are for stupid pious fools. What can we expect of them that’s any better than this random vicious despair? These radicals keep arsenals in their attics and advocate the overthrow of an economic system which has graduated more people out of poverty than any other system in history. They arm themselves to attack honest hard-working citizens like you and me, and to shoot down beleaguered policemen, and what happens? The public is propagandized into outrage over the behavior of the police in defending themselves and the public!”

Behind Ives’s back Sam and Dundee were exchanging bemused glances of tolerant patience; their occasional nods and affirmative grunts were not quite patronizing enough to alert the old man.

Things went on in their peculiarly arcane fashion, as if nothing ever changed; and perhaps nothing had changed for Henry Ives and the others. For Paul everything was different; the shape and color of the world was changed completely from what it had been.

That night across the dinner table he said to Sam, “We’re all born into this society congenitally naive, you know. And those of us who don’t outgrow it become the liberals.”

“Oh now wait a minute, Paul, you can’t—”

“But I can. I most certainly can. Who has a better right than I do?”

It was a question to which neither Sam nor Adele chose to reply.

“It came to me a little while ago what we really are, we liberals. We demand reforms, we want to improve the situation of the underprivileged — why? To make them better off materially? Nuts. It’s only to make ourselves feel less guilty. We rend our garments, we’re eager to show how willing we are to accept any outrageous demand so long as it’s black, or youthful, or put by someone who thinks he’s got a grievance. We want to appease everybody — you know what a liberal is? A liberal is a guy who walks out of the room when the fight starts.”

“I think,” Adele Kreutzer said in a light let’s-clear-the-air tone, “we are witnessing the right-wing radicalization of Paul Benjamin.” She had a strong voice; it went with her long narrow jaw. She was thin and dark and wore a faint aura of self-mocking melancholy. “Of course it’s true there’s no way to go on living in New York. The kind of bastards who do these awful things can only survive in cities like this — put them out in a country village and the exposure would be instantly fatal. There’d be no place for them to hide.”

“You may be right,” Paul said. “But I’m not sure running away is the only answer.”

“I can think of another one,” Sam said, and when he had both their attention he continued complacently: “Drop a ten-megaton nuke with the Empire State Building at ground zero.”

“He’s got it,” Adele said gaily, “by George he’s got it!”

Their clowning was weak but it made its point. For the rest of the evening Paul eschewed the subject but he found it hard to keep his mind on anything else; there were chunks of time when he let their conversation pass him by.

He left early, planning to be home by ten-thirty so that he could call Jack. The Kreutzers seemed relieved to see him go; it would be a while, he thought, before they invited him again.

Well, to hell with them. He disembarked from the elevator and crossed the lobby, noticing that their doorman was nowhere in sight. Anybody could just walk in. His jaw crept forward. He went out onto Forty-fifth and searched the street for a cab but there was nothing in sight; the Kreutzers lived far over on the East Side near the U.N. complex and it wasn’t a busy night-traffic area.

The air was clouded with a fine drizzle. He turned up his jacket collar and put his hands in his pockets and walked up toward Second Avenue, avoiding puddles and refuse. He stayed to the curb edge of the sidewalk because the buildings — parking lots, loading bays — were filled with deep shadows where anyone could be lurking. Only half a block from the lights and traffic of the avenue; but places like this seethed with muggers, he knew. Sour spirals came up from his stomach. His shoulders lifted, his gut hardened. One pace at a time up the gray street, raindrops chilling the back of his neck. His heels echoed on the wet pavement.

It was like running a gauntlet. When he reached the corner he felt he had achieved something.

Reflected neon colors melted and ran along the wet avenue. He crossed it and stood waiting for the roof-light of a free cab to come in sight. Waited several minutes but by then he knew it was going to be one of those nights when there wasn’t a taxi anywhere in the world. He turned a full circle on his heels, making a sweep — nothing. Trucks, the occasional green bus headed downtown, big sedans rushing past with pneumatic hissings, occupied taxis.

A half block north of him a figure staggered into sight under the lights of a storefront: a drunk trying to avoid stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. Coming right toward Paul. In fear he turned quickly and began to walk west along Forty-fifth Street.

It was early but the neighborhood had a four-o’clock-in-the-morning feeling. He didn’t see anyone at all until he got near the corner of Third Avenue. A young couple came in sight, walking uptown, a pudgy fluffy young man in a flared jacket and a girl in belled slacks with straight hair down to her waist: liberated singles, carefully not touching each other, talking animatedly about something fashionable and banal. Perhaps they were deciding whether to go to her apartment or his; perhaps they had already reached the stage of sharing an apartment, their surnames connected by hyphenation on the mailbox. They looked as if they didn’t like each other very much.

Paul waved at an approaching taxi. Its cruise-light was illuminated but it swished past him without slowing. He fought the impulse to yell at it.

He waited through four red lights before a taxi stopped by him. “Seventieth and West End,” he said through his teeth; sat back and banged the top of his head against the car’s fiberboard ceiling. Was it just taxicabs or were the rear seats of all modern cars impossible to sit in without slouching and cringing? Paul hadn’t owned a car since they had returned to the city from their brief fling at suburban life; other than taxis the only car he had been inside in the past year had been the mortuary limousine.

Through the Plexiglas screen that sealed off the rear compartment he had a bad view of the driver; he had an impression of a huge Negro head, a hard roll of dark flesh at the back of the neck. Neither of them said a word.

A red light ahead was out of synch and the driver avoided it by swinging left on Forty-seventh and heading across town. All along the block west of Eighth Avenue there were girls leaning against the walk in dark doorways. On Ninth Avenue there was a troubleseeking cluster of teenage kids with their hands inevitably in their pockets, faces closed up into an unbreakable apathy. Addicts? Perhaps it was just that nothing short of the most violent brutality excited them any more. They looked as if they were waiting to kill someone.

Would he have had the same thought two weeks ago? Probably not, he thought; probably he would have sensed their boredom and resolved to dedicate more time to the neighborhood athletic league: “What these kids need is an interest. We need to set up some ball teams. Now let’s get a committee together and raise a little money for equipment.”

It was no longer the answer. Why should play-at-war games attract them when they had real wars to go to?

These were new thoughts for him and he wasn’t comfortable with them but they kept crowding everything else out of his mind. By the time they passed Lincoln Towers he was deep into a fanciful daydream about a ball-team of vicious teenagers to whom Paul was supplying high-explosive shrapnel grenades, disguised as baseballs, designed to annihilate teenage gangs.

He paid through the little tilt-slot in the plexiglass and got out on the corner. He was about to cross the street when his eye fell on a convertible parked in front of the supermarket. Part of the roof had been slashed open; it hung in gaping shreds. Probably there had been some item of minuscule value visible on the back seat; someone had pulled a knife, ripped the car open, reached in and stolen the object. People ought to know better than to park canvas-topped cars on the streets...

He stopped, drew himself up. What the hell kind of thinking is that?

Do we have to give up every God damned right we have? Do we have to let them scare us into giving up everything?

Fallen rain gleamed on the street like precious gems. He looked over toward the river — along the block, under the concrete of the West Side Highway. The lights of a boat were sliding past. Out there on the filthy river in a boat you’d be safe.

Safe, he thought. And that’s all we have left to shoot for?

The light changed and he had crossed the street and stepped up onto the sidewalk before he saw the man standing in the shadows right by the corner of the building. Standing against the wall, shoulder tilted, arms folded, smiling slightly. A black man in a tight jacket and a cowboy hat. As lean and efficiently designed as a bayonet.

Paul’s toes curled inside his shoes. His hair rose; the adrenalin pumped through his body and made his hands shake. They stood face to face with a yard of drizzling rain between them. The black man never stirred. Paul turned very slowly and put his foot forward and walked up the street with the sound of his heart in his ears.

A panel truck was parked in front of his apartment house, facing the wrong direction for the traffic; there was a police parking ticket on its windshield but it hadn’t been towed away: someone had slipped a few dollars to someone. Paul stopped beside the truck and used its big outside mirror to look back along the street. The black man stood where he had been, indistinct in the shadows. Streaming sweat, Paul went into the building.

The man’s smile: did he know who Paul was? Was he one of the ones who had killed Esther?

He was letting his imagination run away with him. Come on, get a grip on yourself. Kids, Carol had said. Teenagers. This guy was full-grown — he wasn’t one of them. Probably his amusement had been purely the result of Paul’s all-too-obvious fear; probably he was an intellectual, a playwright or a musician who’d just decided to post himself on that corner and see how long it would take the cops to roust him along — some sort of experiment to prove something about white bigotry.

Paul thought about going back outside and telling the guy it wasn’t a very wise experiment. If I’d had a gun in my pocket and you’d looked at me like that you might have been in a lot of trouble, fella. It was only a fantasy; there was no possibility of his going back outside. He nodded to the doorman and went back to the elevator.

A common enough fantasy though, I’ll bet. If I’d been there when that guy slashed that roof — if I’d seen it happen, and I’d been armed at the time...