Let’s Hear It For The Deaf Man

10

Sunday.

Take a look at this city.

How can you possibly hate her?

She is composed of five sections as alien to each other as foreign countries with a common border; indeed, many residents of Isola are more familiar with the streets of England or France than they are with those of Bethtown, a stone’s throw across the river. Her natives, too, speak dissimilar tongues. It is not uncommon for a Calm’s Point accent to sound as unintelligible as the sounds a Welshman makes.

How can you hate this untidy bitch?

She is all walls, true. She flings up buildings like army stockades designed for protection against an Indian population long since cheated and departed. She hides the sky. She blocks her rivers from view. (Never perhaps in the history of mankind has a city so neglected the beauty of her waterways or treated them so casually. Were her rivers lovers, they would surely be unfaithful.) She forces you to catch glimpses of herself in quick takes, through chinks in long canyons, here a wedge of water, there a slice of sky, never a panoramic view, always walls enclosing, constricting, yet how can you hate her, this flirtatious bitch with smoky hair?

She’s noisy and vulgar; there are runs in her nylons, and her heels are round (you can put this lady on her back with a kind word or a knowing leer because she’s a sucker for attention, always willing to please, anxious to prove she’s at least as good as most). She sings too fucking loud. Her lipstick is smeared across her face like an obscene challenge. She raises her skirt or drops it with equal abandon, she snarls, she belches, she hustles, she farts, she staggers, she falls, she’s common, vile, treacherous, dangerous, brittle, vulnerable, stupid, obstinate, clever, and cheap, but it is impossible to hate her because when she steps out of the shower smelling of gasoline and sweat and smoke and grass and wine and flowers and food and dust and death (never mind the high-pollution level), she wears that blatant stink like the most expensive perfume. If you were born in a city, and raised in a city, you know the scent and it makes you dizzy. Not the scent of all the half-ass towns, hamlets, and villages that pose as cities and fool no one but their own hick inhabitants. There are half a dozen real cities in the world, and this is one of them, and it’s impossible to hate her when she comes to you with a suppressed female giggle about to burst on her silly face, bubbling up from some secret adolescent well to erupt in merriment on her unpredictable mouth. (If you can’t personalize a city, you have never lived in one. If you can’t get romantic and sentimental about her, you’re a foreigner still learning the language. Try Philadelphia, you’ll love it there.) To know a real city, you’ve got to hold her close or not at all. You’ve got to breathe her.

Take a look at this city.

How can you possibly hate her?

The Sunday comics have been read and the apartment is still.

The man sitting in the easy chair is black, forty-seven years old, wearing an undershirt, denim trousers, and house slippers. He is a slender man, with brown eyes too large for his face, so that he always looks either frightened or astonished. There is a mild breeze blowing in off the fire escape, where the man’s eight-year-old daughter has planted four o’clocks in a cheese box as part of a school project. The balmy feel of the day reminds the man that summer is coming. He frowns. He is suddenly upset, but he does not know quite why. His wife is next door visiting with a neighbor woman, and he feels neglected all at once, and begins wondering why she isn’t preparing lunch for him, why she’s next door gabbing when he’s beginning to get hungry and summer is coming.

He gets out of the easy chair, sees perhaps for the hundredth time that the upholstery is worn in spots, the batting revealed. He sighs heavily. Again, he does not know why he is agitated. He looks down at the linoleum. The pattern has been worn off by the scuffings of years, and he stares at the brownish-red underlay and wonders where the bright colors went. He thinks he will turn on the television set and watch a baseball game, but it is too early yet, the game will not start until later in the day. He does not know what he wants to do with himself. And summer is coming.

He works in a toilet, this man.

He has a little table in a toilet in one of the hotels downtown. There is a white cloth on the table. There is a neat pile of hand towels on the table. There is a comb and a brush on the table. There is a dish in which the man puts four quarters when he begins work, in the hope that the tips he receives from male urinators will be at least as generous. He does not mind the work so much in the wintertime. He waits while his customers urinate, and then he hands them fresh towels, and he brushes off their coats and tries not to appear as if he is waiting for a tip. Most of the men tip him. Some of them do not. He goes home each night with toilet smells in his nostrils, and sometimes he is awakened by the rustling of rats in the empty hours, and the stench is still there, and he goes into the bathroom and puts salt into the palm of his hand and dilutes it with water and sniffs it up into his nose, but the smell will not go away.

In the winter, he does not mind the job too much.

In the summer, in his airless cubicle stinking of the waste of other men, he wonders whether he will spend the rest of his life unfolding towels, extending them to strangers, brushing coats, and waiting hopefully for quarter tips, trying not to look anxious, trying not to show on his face that those quarters are all that stand between him and welfare, all that stand between him and the loss of whatever shred of human dignity he still possesses.

Summer is coming.

He stands bleakly in the middle of the living room and listens to the drip of the water tap in the kitchen.

When his wife comes into the apartment some ten minutes later, he beats her senseless, and then holds her body close to his, and rocks her, keening, keening, rocking her, and still not knowing why he is agitated, or why he has tried to kill the one person on earth he loves.

In the April sunshine four fat men sit at a chess table in the park across the street from the university. All four of the men are wearing dark cardigan sweaters. Two of the men are playing chess, and two of them are kibitzing, but the game has been going on for so many Sundays now that it seems almost as though they are playing four-handed, the players and the kibitzers indistinguishable one from the other.

The white boy who enters the park is seventeen years old. He is grinning happily. He walks with a jaunty stride, and he sucks deep draughts of good spring air into his lungs, and he looks at the girls in their abbreviated skirts, and admires their legs, and feels horny and alive and masculine and strong.

When he comes abreast of the chess table where the old men are in deep concentration, he suddenly whirls and sweeps his hand across the table top, knocking the chessmen to the ground. Grinning, he walks off, and the old men sigh and pick up the pieces and prepare to start the game all over again, though they know the one important move, the crucial move, has been lost to them forever.

The afternoon dawdles.

It is Sunday, the tempo of the city is lackadaisical. Grover Park has been closed to traffic, and cyclists pedal along the winding paths through banks of forsythia and cornelian cherry. A young girl’s laughter carries for blocks. How can you possibly hate this city with her open empty streets stretching from horizon to horizon?

They are sitting on opposite sides of the cafeteria table. The younger one is wearing a turtleneck sweater and blue jeans. The older one is wearing a dark blue suit over a white shirt open at the throat, no tie. They are talking in hushed voices.

“I’m sorry,” the one in the suit says. “But what can I do, huh?”

“Well, yeah, I know,” the younger one answers. “I thought... since it’s so close, you know?”

“Close, Ralphie, but no cigar.”

“Well, only two bucks short is all, Jay.”

“Two bucks is two bucks.”

“I thought maybe just this once.”

“I’d help you if I could, Ralphie, but I can’t.”

“Because I plan to go see my mother tomorrow, you know, and she’s always good for a hit.”

“Go see her tonight.”

“Yeah, I would, only she went out to Sands Spit. We got people out there. My father drove her out there this morning.”

“Then go see her tomorrow. And after you see her, you can come see me.”

“Yeah, Jay, but... I’m starting to feel sick, you know?”

“That’s too bad, Ralphie.”

“Oh, sure, listen, I know it ain’t your fault.”

“You know it ain’t.”

“I know, I know.”

“I’m in business, same as anybody else.”

“Of course you are, Jay. Am I saying you ain’t? Am I asking you for freebies? If it wasn’t so close, I wouldn’t ask you at all.”

“Two dollars ain’t close.”

“Maybe for strangers it ain’t, Jay. But we know each other a long time, ain’t that true?”

“That’s true.”

“I’m a good customer, Jay. You know that.”

“I know that.”

“You carry me till tomorrow, Jay...”

“I can’t, Ralphie. I just can’t do it. If I did it for you, I’d have to do it for everybody on the street.”

“Who’d know? I wouldn’t tell a soul. I swear to God.”

“Word gets around. Ralphie, you’re a nice guy, I mean that from the bottom of my heart. But I can’t help you. If I knew you didn’t have the bread, I wouldn’t even have come to meet you. I mean it.”

“Yeah, but it’s only two bucks.”

“Two bucks here, two bucks there, it adds up. Who takes the risks, Ralphie, you or me?”

“Well, you, sure. But...”

“So now you’re asking me to lay the stuff on you free.”

“I’m not. I’m asking you to carry me till tomorrow when I get the bread from my old lady. That’s all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Jay? Jay, listen, have I ever asked you before? Have I ever once come to you and not had the bread? Tell the truth.”

“No, that’s true.”

“Have I ever complained when I got stuck with shit that wasn’t...”

“Now wait a minute, you never got no bad stuff from me. Are you trying to say I laid bad stuff on you?”

“No, no. Who said that?”

“I thought that’s what you said.”

“No, no.”

“Then what did you say?”

“I meant when the stuff was bad all over the city. When the heat was on. Last June. You remember last June? When it was so hard to get anything halfway decent? That’s what I meant.”

“Yeah, I remember last June.”

“I’m saying I never complained. When things were bad, I mean. I never complained.”

“So?”

“So help me out this once, Jay, and...”

“I can’t, Ralphie.”

“Jay? Please.”

“I can’t.”

“Jay?”

“No, Ralphie. Don’t ask me.”

“I’ll get the money tomorrow, I swear to God.”

“No.”

“I’ll see my mother tomorrow...”

“No.”

“And get the money for you. Okay? What do you say, huh?”

“I got to split, Ralphie. You go see your mother...”

“Jay, please. Jay, I’m sick, I mean it. Please.”

“See your mother, get the money...”

“Jay, please!”

“And then talk to me, okay?”

“Jay!”

“So long, Ralphie.”

Dusk moves rapidly over the city, spreading through the sky above Calm’s Point to fill with guttering purple the crevices between chimney pot and spire. Flickers of yellow appear in window slits, neon tubes burst into oranges and blues, race around the shadowed sides of buildings to swallow their sputtering tails. Traffic signals blink in fiercer reds and brighter greens, emboldened by the swift descent of darkness. Color claims the night. It is impossible to hate this glittering nest of gems.

The patrolman does not know what to do.

The woman is hysterical, and she is bleeding from a cut over her left eye, and he does not know whether he should first call an ambulance or first go upstairs to arrest the man who hit her. The sergeant solves his dilemma, fortuitously arriving in a prowl car, and getting out, and coming over to where the woman is babbling and the patrolman is listening with a puzzled expression on his face.

The person who hit her is her husband, the woman says. But she does not want to press charges. That’s not what she wants from the police.

The sergeant knows an assault when he sees one and is not particularly interested in whether or not the woman wants to press charges. But it is a nice Sunday night in April, and he would much rather stand here on the sidewalk and listen to the woman (who is not bad-looking, and who is wearing a nylon wrapper over nothing but bikini panties) than go upstairs to arrest whoever clobbered her over the eye.

The woman is upset because her husband has said he is going to kill himself. He hit her over the eye with a milk bottle and then he locked himself in the bathroom and started running the water in the tub and yelling that he was going to kill himself. The woman does not want him to kill himself because she loves him. That’s why she ran down into the street, practically naked, to find the nearest cop. So he could stop her husband from killing himself.

The sergeant is somewhat bored. He keeps assuring the woman that anybody who’s going to kill himself doesn’t go around advertising it, he just goes right ahead and does it. But the woman is hysterical and still bleeding, and the sergeant feels he ought to set a proper example for the young patrolman. “Come on, kid,” he says, and the two of them start into the tenement building while the patrolman at the wheel of the RMP car radios in for a meat wagon. The lady sits weakly on the fender of the car. She has just begun to notice that she is pouring blood from the open cut over her eye, and has gone very pale. The patrolman at the wheel thinks she is going to faint, but he does not get out of the car.

On the third floor of the building (Apartment 31, the lady told them), the sergeant knocks briskly on the closed door, waits, listens, knocks again, and then turns to the patrolman and again says, “Come on, kid.” The door is unlocked. The apartment is still save for the sound of running water in the bathroom.

“Anybody home?” the sergeant calls. There is no answer. He shrugs, makes a “Come on, kid” gesture with his head, and starts for the closed bathroom door. He is reaching for the knob when the door opens.

The man is naked.

He has climbed out of the tub where the water still runs, and his pale white body is glistening wet. The water in the tub behind him is red. He has slashed the arteries of his left wrist, and he is gushing blood onto the white tile floor while behind him water splashes into the tub. He holds a broken milk bottle in his right hand, presumably the same bottle with which he struck his wife, and the moment he throws open the bathroom door he swings the bottle at the sergeant’s head. The sergeant is concerned about several things, and only one of them has to do with the possibility that he may be killed in the next few moments. He is concerned about grappling with a naked man, he is concerned about getting blood on his new uniform, he is concerned about putting on a good show for the patrolman.

The man is screaming, “Leave me alone, let me die,” and lunging repeatedly at the sergeant with the jagged ends of the broken bottle. The sergeant, fat and puffing, is trying desperately to avoid each new lunge, trying to grab the man’s arm, trying to stay out of the way of those pointed glass shards, trying to draw his revolver, trying to do all these things while the man keeps screaming and thrashing and thrusting the bottle at his face and neck.

There is a sudden shocking explosion. The bleeding man lets out a final scream and drops the bottle. It shatters on the tile, and the sergeant watches in bug-eyed fascination as the man keels over backwards and falls into the red-stained water in the tub. The sergeant wipes sweat from his lip and turns to look at the patrolman, whose smoking service revolver is in his hand. The patrolman’s eyes are squinched in pain. He keeps staring at the tub where the man has sunk beneath the surface of the red water.

“Nice going, kid,” the sergeant says.

The city is asleep.

The streets lamps are all that glow now, casting pale illumination over miles and miles of deserted sidewalks. In the apartment buildings the windows are dark save for an occasional bathroom, where a light flickers briefly and then dies. Everything is still. So still.

Take a look at this city.

How can you possibly hate her?