Great Jones Street

7

Opel's belongings were everywhere, objects of an earlier life spent in real places, her past on lonely soil. Hers were possessions resonant with time, a sense of years collected, crystal beads, guitar straps, rosewood stash boxes, hardware catalogues, Mexican candlesticks, simplest of things, every one endowed with the power of her absence, electric yogurt maker, ten-foot hand-knitted scarf. I moved the bed to the center of the room. Sleep seemed more possible here.

Fenig came to visit, saying he was in a coffee-drinking mood. I looked around the room for coffee. I looked everywhere without results. Then I looked for cups. There were no clean cups. All the cups were in the sink, sitting inside each other. I looked around for sugar. I tried to find a clean spoon in the drawer of the small cabinet. The drawer was full of string, buttons and penny postage stamps. I began to sweat, a mean animal odor soaking my clothes. I hunted around for a saucer but there wasn't a single one anywhere, clean or dirty. Fenig liked his coffee black so there was no need to look for cream, milk or half-and-half. Someone shouted in the hall downstairs. I opened the door and we went out and looked over the banister. A man straddled a sample case, waving a brush at us.

"Foreign armless vets of the Second War. A three-dollar sum of money guarantees you selected brushes made by handicapped ex-fighting men. Brushes for home, industry, the car, the toilet. Are you self-employed? Brushes for the self-employed. Ill listen to bids, anybody in the building, two-fifty to start it off and you couldn't believe what that sum of money is capable of buying in the way of a pre-selected industrial brush. Armless in the European and Jap theaters of World War number two. They went and they fought. Their names were Ryan, Bandini, Hogan, Ryan. They stepped ashore in strange lands where they didn't know a soul. This is not stolen merchandise. This is merchandise made and guaranteed by the living maimed of our nation. Iwo Jima, Corregidor, Salerno, Tobruk, Belleau Wood, Bataan, back to Bataan, Iwo Jima, Paris, Norway."

"How many wars are you selling?" Fenig said.

"Dollar seventy-five I'll take. A selected car broom. Keeps your dashboard free of foreign matter. Fits any. glove compartment, big or little or money back. Jumping; out of troop planes. Hand to hand in the trenches. Loose lips sink ships. Graduating from tail-gunner school. Armless and legless. Can't even salute the flag they died for. Ninety-five cents, I'll come up and get it; a quarter, just roll it down the stairs. Guadalcanal, Burma, espionage, ack-ack. They fought on the sea, in planes and trains, on motorcycles with sidecars, under the water in submarine warfare. A three-dollar brush made by a vet for fifty cents even, plus tax. Seven patriotic colors. I am not a hustler. This is not a brush hustle. They came from places like Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids, San Diego, Alabama. They went and they fought and they got hurt, some of them, pretty bad. Kansas City, Kansas. Kansas City, Missouri. It was war, it was war."

We went back inside. I got on my knees and looked in the cabinet space under the sink for some sign of a coffee can. But what sign? Either the coffee can would be there or it wouldn't. There was no sign involved. I kept at it, determined to conduct an intelligent search. The idea of coffee was overpowering. Finding it and brewing it. Feeling the thick liquid wash down my throat and divide itself into tributaries and attenuated falls. If I could find a clean spoon, the coffee might turn up next. My shirt felt heavy and wet, sticking to my back. There was still hope of locating a trace of sugar somewhere in the room – a lump stuck in the bottom of the box, some brownish fossils to be scraped off the sides of the sugar bowl, assuming the box and sugar bowl existed. Given this or even part of it, I might then find coffee or at least a saucer that might lead to coffee. Signs that serve no purpose are logically meaningless, according to something I'd read once and tried to remember. I had it wrong but that didn't matter. I was votary and dupe of superstition. If I could find the box of sugar, it would lead me to a clean spoon. Spoon secured, named and agreed on, we pursue the formal concept to its inevitable end, which is coffee. The salesman appeared in the doorway.

"Marks, drachmas, rubles, pounds, shillings, yens. I'll take anything and everything. The Swiss franc, the French franc, the Bulgarian stotinki. Here, take a brush for a free ten-day home trial. At the end of that time, pay me any way you like. Piasters, pesos, kopecks, bolivars, rupees, dongs. I'm a long-time student of world currency and exchange rates. I bet you don't know how many puli in the Afghanistan afghani. I bet you can't guess where the kwacha comes from."

"You're talking about thirty years ago," Fenig said. "These guys are still making brushes?"

There is no need to look for cream, milk or half-and-half (I repeated to myself). Fenig likes his coffee black. There is no need to look for cream, milk or half-and-half.