Epitaph

SIX

William?" He'd opened the door now; he stood half in and half out of the room, his shadow spread before him like a stain.

"Hello, Mr. Brickman," William said, raising his glass, toasting his entrance, except that Mr. Brickman hadn't entered, not exactly, and thinking that this wasn't like Mr. Brickman, standing half in and half out, that something had made him cautious.

"William. You drinking…?"

"No." William took another swallow of bourbon; he'd already reached that point where his good friend Jack had stopped feeling like liquid fire and started feeling like solid fire. "What makes you think I'm drinking?" He was annoyed, annoyed at having company when he hadn't asked for it, annoyed too at the way Mr. Brickman was standing there, as if something was wrong, as if all of a sudden Mr. Brickman was going to begin making apologies and stop knocking on doors.

"What's the matter, Mr. Brickman?"

Mr. Brickman shuffled his feet, as if not quite sure where to put them.

"Eddie," he said. "Eddie was mugged today. There were two of them-they broke his ribs and punctured a lung. They don't think he's going to make it."

Eddie. Eddie Wilson-Mr. Wilson, who lived downstairs and was probably the oldest man in the apartment house, Mr. Wilson, who smoked a pipe and read Harlequin Romances, devoutly, as if trying to discover the secret of love. No more.

So, William thought. Mr. Wilson lies halfway gone and so does Mr. Brickman, half in and half out.

"Come in," William said, as solemnly as he could on three bourbons. Four… "Come in and sit down."

So he did. On the only other chair in the room, a bridge chair the landlord had given William when he'd first moved in, figuring even he'd have to have a visitor eventually, even if it was only Mr. Brickman.

"Drink?" William offered.

But Mr. Brickman declined.

"Where did it happen?"

"In the park. In the park, with me. You didn't want to go, so I took Eddie."

Had Mr. Brickman asked him to the park? Well maybe he had. William felt a stab of guilt at having refused him; that, and a palpable relief that he had. After all, Mr. Brick- man would simply be in Eddie's room now, making Mr. Wilson put down The Countess from Cordoba so he could hear every word about William's bad luck, about the terrible beating, the punctured lung, and so on…

"We were almost ready to leave," Mr. Brickman continued, "when they came up to us, two of them, and asked us for money. Eddie said no. So they began to hit him…"

Eddie said no. Eddie said no because Eddie had no. Money. Maybe a silver dollar or two snuck away in a cardboard box. The Social Security checks he banked.

"What did you do, Mr. Brickman?"

"I went for help," saying it in a tone that suggested he hadn't found any. "I think something's happened, William, honest to God."

"Something…?" not exactly understanding what Mr. Brickman was talking about, due to either the three bourbons, okay four, or the fact that Mr. Brickman himself didn't know what he was talking about, being, of course, not the old aggressive and gregarious Mr. Brickman, but the new cautious and possibly traumatized Mr. Brickman.

"Something's happened. I'm scared. They say it's a jungle out there, fine, only they don't tell you, they do not tell you you're the goddamn herd. You understand, that's who we are. The herd. You stay in the herd and maybe you're okay. Maybe. But you go off by yourself, you get caught alone, and then, they get you. Who? The carnivores-that's who. They wait for you and then they get you."

Okay, maybe Mr. Brickman did know what he was talking about, sort of. There was every possibility that he did. William was nodding his head at him on the chance that he was being entirely lucid, but it seemed to take a monumental effort to get it to move. He sensed that Mr. Brickman was expecting him to say something; he sensed this because Mr. Brickman had stopped talking and was looking at him with an expression that could only be termed hopeful. But William had nothing to offer him, nothing but the landlord's chair and a chorus of one. "You have to stick together now, Will," Mr Brickman finally said. "There's safety in numbers…" "Yes," William echoed, "safety in numbers," continuing to provide the refrain for a sermon he didn't quite grasp. But the truth was, he did. Even dead drunk, he did. Mr. Brickman, annoyingly gung ho, irritatingly life- affirming, was learning old: that when you dragged yourself to a scorched brown park in the middle of July someone else might have to drag you back. Mr. Brick- man had become one of them, another terminal case, and it made William sad, sadder suddenly than he had any reason to feel. "Maybe Mr. Wilson will make it," he said now, but he didn't sound very convincing, even to himself, on a scale of one to ten, somewhere south of two. Mr. Brickman looked up then, as if he'd suddenly been reminded of something important. "I'm sorry," he said. So, William thought, apologizing after all. "What for, Mr. Brickman?" "You went to a funeral today, didn't you? You've had enough for one day." "No." William finished his drink. "Not yet." A little drinking humor. "Was it an old friend, Will?" "Who?"

"The person who died?"

"He was old, but I don't think he was a friend."

"What does that mean?" Mr. Brickman sounded almost mad at him now, as if he found his tone disrespectful in respect to the dead, which, to be honest, was the very tone William was going for.

"That means I don't know if he was a friend or if he wasn't. I can't remember."

"You remembered," Mr. Brickman said, "enough to go."

"Right," William said. "I guess that's all you can hope for, isn't it?" pouring himself just one more, which is what he'd poured himself the last time and the time before that. "That people remember you enough to go." Interesting, he thought. Four drinks, five, and he became positively reflective. He was trying to remember Mr. Brickman's first name. He called him Mr. Brickman, all these years that's what he'd called him. Of course, that's the way he'd addressed his clients, always Mr. and Mrs., never by their first names; perhaps Mr. Brickman was just one more client, another parishioner, another person in need of comfort, carnivores and things. But then, he had no clients anymore, he hadn't had any in a long time.

"What's that?" Mr. Brickman was pointing at the box, Jean's box, with a slightly quivering finger; or at least that's the way it looked to William's slightly quivering brain.

"Junk," William said. What had Rodriguez told him? It's junk to me-but to you? But Rodriguez was wrong. It was junk to both of them. He'd dumped the box by the front door on the way in, dumped it on its side, so that it looked now like a package the day after Christmas, almost like that, as if the wrapping had been ripped off and then the gift found wanting, so that now it was waiting to be returned to the store where it came from.

"Well," Mr. Brickman said after several moments of dead silence, dead seeming to be the theme of the day, "I will pray for Eddie."

"Yes, Mr. Brickman. That's a good idea."

And Mr. Brickman left, got up and left, peering into the hall first as if crossing a street in the middle of a block and searching for oncoming traffic.

Which left William alone again, savoring the last bit of glass number five before he embarked on glass number six. Only when he went to pour it, he committed the unpardonable. He knocked his good friend Jack right off the armrest.

Whoops.

Whiskey ran across his pitifully worn-down carpet like a flash flood, rolling out toward the door, and-what's that?-by way of innocent proximity-toward the box, Jean's box.

William sprang into action. Okay-crawled, stumbled, staggered, making it there just in the nick of time-lifting up the box before it was hit by a wave of eighty-six- proof alcohol.

The box seemed heavier than before; of course he was drunker than before. He dumped it onto the bed where it sank into the mattress with a slight groan.

What was he doing with it anyway? What would Rodriguez try to give him next-Jean's ashes? Ashes, drapes, and pictures. William sat down beside it, looking it over, assessing the damage. Everything more or less shipshape. He opened the top flaps and peered inside.

Yeah, it was junk all right.

In Jean's box: a small retractable umbrella, a pair of black rubbers, a library card, sunglasses-one lens slightly cracked-a key chain-no keys-salt and pepper shakers with the words Lake Tahoe painted on the bottom of each, a novelty pen which when held upside down transformed a sweet demurely dressed girl into a sweet undressed girl, three packets of dental floss, several utility bills from Con Edison, several threatening letters from Con Edison, a campaign flyer, a baseball program. And a phone book. He dumped it all out onto the bed.

Of course it was the phone book he was drawn to; old habits die hard. A small black phone book, the kind bachelors in the fifties were supposed to carry around with them, little black books filled with conquests. But this little black book was filled with empty pages, mostly empty pages, and little proverbs that were printed at the top of each page-one to a letter. A rolling stone gathers no moss was one of them. Don't judge a book by its cover was another. Little pithy sayings, the kind of thing they started putting in fortune cookies when they stopped putting in fortunes. William wondered if Jean had read them, if they had amused him maybe, even caused him to laugh out loud. Probably not. Jean never laughed, certainly not out loud. Am I laughing, William? William guessed that he'd stopped laughing the day they turned his family into a picture. And now, looking down at the contents of the box spread helter-skelter like a rummage sale across his bed, William wondered just where that picture was, because it wasn't here. Maybe all that Scotch tape had simply grown as brittle as the picture itself, finally splintering into a kind of dust, becoming, in a way, like Jean. Maybe one day Jean had simply looked at it and not known them anymore, the way a childhood picture becomes, after a while, just a picture of a child, any child or every child, but not you. William didn't think that likely, but then, it was hard to say. He suddenly wished he'd known Jean then, back when he was helping his Jews across the border, before they'd tattooed his arm and scarred his soul, back before the fall, because then maybe, just maybe, he'd feel sad that Jean had died. But that was crying over spilt ash, wasn't it. William put the pen, the bills, the shakers, the flyer, the baseball program, put it all back into the box; he left out only the phone book.

He barely made it back to his chair, not so much sitting down on it as flopping into it. The room was kind of spinning on him, a little like a carousel just before it comes to a halt, when nervous parents are already madly racing to grab their children who only want another go- round. William, of course, wanted off.

He began to leaf through the book again, to take a leisurely stroll through Proverb Land. Under P-People in glass houses should not… -was Sam's Pizzeria 8723490. The page was worn, covered in thumbprints, pizza being a staple of sorts for solitary people who don't cook and don't go out, which in New York means half the people over the age of seventy. William had eaten his fair share of pizza. Under R, under Rule your emotions and they won't rule you, was Rodriguez: janitor, funeral director, and executor of the will. Under D, Don't judge a book by its… were a few names, an Alain, a Marie, a Michelle, but all without numbers, as if Jean had written them down to remind him of something, and under I, It's the bad wheel that does the most squeaking, was a number with no name: 873-5521.

If William hadn't been drunk, or at least so drunk, if he'd had, say, two drinks instead of five, he would have put the phone book back into the box then and drifted into sleep, or at least collapsed into a stupor. In the morning he would have carted the box out to the garbage in front and dumped it in. Then he would have gone to OTB and laid a bet, laid several bets, starting with Gold's Sheet, but quickly moving on to horses whose names began with hard consonants. In this way, he would have eventually lost all his money, all being a relative term, since all his money wouldn't fill a regulation piggybank, unless his luck turned, of course, which from time to time it did, but with no regularity he could depend on. Then, either so much richer or so much poorer, he would have made his way back to his room. Just your average day, in which he would've hurt no one and, with a little luck, no one would've hurt him. But okay, he'd had five drinks, not four, and certainly not two. The room wasn't spinning anymore, but it wasn't exactly standing still either. And being five drinks stiff to the wind, being just a little sorry for himself, grappling with this notion that there'd been a serious omission in the matter of Jean's death, because there'd been only two mourners there when there should have been more, and both mourners had mourned nothing, he stared at the lone number for more than a minute, then called it.

A woman answered.

"Hello," she said. "Who's there?"

"A friend of a friend," William said.

"Uh huh," she said in a tone completely devoid of surprise. "A friend of what friend?"

"Jean. Jean Goldblum."

"Oh." Pause. So maybe she knew, had already scanned the obits and knew. "You'd like to see me I guess?"

Well yes, he would.

"Sure. Why not. I'd love to see you."

"Sure. Let me see… wait a minute… how about, oh, nine o clock? Is that okay with you?"

More than okay. Terrific actually. Couldn't be better.

"Tonight? Nine o'clock tonight?"

"Yes. Would you like to come another night?"

He'd have to consult his schedule on that one. Nope. Sorry, all booked up tomorrow night, it'd have to be tonight.

"Tonight's fine."

"Okay. Why don't you write down my address."

"Sure. Go ahead."

"Thirteen-eighty-one Yellowstone Boulevard. Apartment 9D. That's Yellowstone. A friend of Jean's, huh?"

"That's right. A friend."

"Yes. Well, we're all friends now, aren't we."

Absolutely. All of us, friends.

"I'll see you at nine," William said, then he put the phone back in its cradle, smacked it down hard, and wondered exactly what it is that he'd done.