Shatterday

Carl Schurz Park was calm. Unlike vast sections of the city, it could be visited after dark without fear. The stillness, the calmness: marauders seldom lurked there.

He took a bench and sat staring off across the cave of water. The pain was persistent and he massaged the inner comers of his eyes with a gentle fingertip.

There had been a woman he had met at a cocktail party. From Maine. He hesitated to think of her in such simplified ways, but there was no denying her sweetness and virginity. Congregationalist, raised too well for life in this city, she had come here from Maine to work in publishing, and the men had not been good to her. Attracted by her well-scrubbed face and her light, gentle manner, they had stepped out with her two, three, once even four times. But she had been raised too well for life taken in late-night sessions, and they had drifted back to their meat racks and their loneliness mutually shared. One had even suggested she seduce a platonic friend of hers, a gentle young man coming to grips with his sexuality, and then she would be fit for a proper affair. She had asked him to leave. The following week he was seeing the wife of a production assistant at the publishing house in which they all labored, and the girl from Maine had signed up for tap dancing lessons.

She had met Brubaker at the cocktail party and they had talked, leaning out the thirty-first floor window to escape the smoke and the chatter.

It became clear to him that she had decided he was the one. Reality and upbringing waged their war in her, and she had decided to capitulate. He walked her home and she said, “Come in for a graham cracker. I have lots of them.” He said, “What time is it?” His watch said 12:07. ‘‘I’ll come up till twelve-fifteen.” She smiled shyly and said, “I’m being aggressive. It’s not easy for me.” He said, “I don’t want to come up for very long. We might get into trouble.” He meant it. He liked her. But she was hurting. “It’s not a kind of trouble you haven’t been in before,” she said. He smiled gently and said, “No, but it’s a kind of trouble you’ve never been in.”

But he could not refuse her. And he was good with her, as good as he could be, accepting the responsibility, hoping when she found the man she had been saving herself for, he would be very very loving. At least, he knew, he had put her out of reach of the kind of men who sought virgins. Neither the sort who would marry only a virgin, nor the predators who went on safari for such endangered species were human enough for her.

And when he left, the next morning, he had a headache. The same pinpoint of anguish that now pulsed between and above his eyes as he sat in the park. He had felt changed after leaving her, just as he did tonight. Was there a diminishing taking place?

Why did imperfect people seek him out and need him?

He knew himself to be no wiser, no nobler, no kinder than most people were capable of being, if given the chance. But he seemed to be a focal point for those who were in need of kindness; gentle words, soft touches. It had always been so for him. Yet he had no needs of his own.

Was it possible never to be touched, to give endlessly, no matter how much was asked, and never to name one’s own desire? It was like living behind a pane of one-way glass; seeing out, while no one could see in. Polyphemus, the one-eyed, trapped in his cave, ready victim for all the storm-tossed Odysseus creatures who came to him unbidden. And like Polyphemus, denied half his sight; was he always to be a victim of the storm- tossed? Was there a limit to how much he could give? All he knew of need was what was demanded of him, blind in one eye to personal necessities.

The wind rose and shivered the tops of the trees.

It smelled very clean and fresh. As she had.

Out on the East River a dark shape slid smoothly across his line of sight and he thought of some lonely scow carrying the castoff remnants of life downtide to a nameless grave where blind fish and things with many legs sculled through the darkness, picking over the remains.

He rose from the bench and walked down through the park.

To his right, in the empty playground, the wind pushed the children’s swings. They squealed and creaked. The dark shape out there, skimming along obscuring Roosevelt Island, was heading south downriver. He decided to pace it. He might have gone straight ahead till Schurz Park ended, then crossed the John Finley Walkway over the East River Drive traffic, but the dark shape out there fascinated him. As far as he could tell, he had no connection with it, in any way, of any kind. Utterly uninvolved with the shape. It meant nothing to him; and for that reason, chiefly, it was something to follow.

At 79th Street, the park’s southern boundary behind him, East End Avenue came to a dead end facing the side of the East End Hotel. To his left, where 79th Street’s eastern extremity terminated against the edge of Manhattan Island, worlds-end, a low metal barrier blocked off the street from the Drive. He walked to the barrier. Out there the black shape had come to rest on the river.

Cars flashed past like accelerated particles, their lights blending one into another till chromatic bands of blue and red and silver and white formed a larger barrier beyond the low metal fence blocking his passage. Passage where? Across six lanes of thundering traffic and a median that provided no protection? Protection from what? He stepped off the curb and did not realize he had climbed over the metal fencing to do so. He stepped off into the seamless, light-banded traffic.

Like walking across water. He crossed the uptown-bound lanes, between the cars, walking between the raindrops, untouched. He reached the median and kept going. Through the downtown-bound bands of light to the far side.

He looked back at the traffic. It had never touched him; but that didn’t seem strange, somehow. He knew it should, but between the now-blistering headache and his feeling of being partially disembodied, it was inconsequential.

He climbed the low metal barrier and stood on the narrow ledge of concrete. The East River lay below him. He sat down on the concrete ledge and let his legs dangle. The black shape was directly across from him, in the middle of the river. He lowered himself down the face of the concrete wall till his feet touched the black skin of the East River.

He had met a woman at a library sale two years before. The New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue had been clearing out excess and damaged stock. They had set up the tables in tiny Bryant Park abutting the library on the 42nd Street side. He had reached for a copy of Jose Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses in the 15th anniversary Norton edition, just as she had reached for it. They came up with the book together, and looked across the table at each other. He took her for coffee at the Swiss Chalet on East 48th.

They went to bed only once, though he continued to see her for several months while she tried to make up her mind whether she would return to her husband; he was in the restaurant linen supply business. For the most part, Brubaker sat and listened to her.

“The thing I most hate about Ed is that he’s so damned self sufficient,” she said. “I always feel if I were to vanish, he’d forget me in a week and get himself another woman and keep right on the way he is.”

Brubaker said, “People have confided in me, and they’ve been almost ashamed of saying it, though I don’t know why they should be, that the pain of losing someone only lasts about a week. At least with any intensity. And then it’s simply a dull ache for a while until someone else comes along.”

“I feel so guilty seeing you and not, uh, you know.”

“That’s all right,” he said, “I enjoy your company. And if I can be of any use, talking to me, so you get your thoughts straight, well, that’s better than being a factor that keeps you and Ed apart.”

“You’re so kind. Jesus, if Ed were only a fraction as kind as you, we’d have no problems. But he’s so selfish! Little things. He’ll squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, especially a new one, and he knows how that absolutely unhinges me, and he’ll spit the paste all over the fixtures so I have to go at them a hundred times a week —”

And he listened to her and listened to her and listened to her, but she was too nervous for sex, and that was all right; he really did like her and wanted to be of some help.

There were times when she cried in his arms, and said they should take an apartment together, and she’d do it in a minute if it weren’t for the children and half the business being in her name. There were times when she raged around his apartment, slamming cabinet doors and talking back to the television, cursing Ed for some cruelty he had visited on her. There were times when she would sit curled up staring out the window of Brubaker’s apartment, running the past through her mind like prayer beads of sorrow.