Desire made her close her eyes, not for Gordon, not for a prince, but for the human man who would return her to her envelope of skin and sit beside her in the afternoon light.
Her friends had their problems too. Someone dedicated her seventh martini to the extinct American male. Shell did not raise her glass; besides, she didn’t like hen parties. The toast-mistress regretted the death of American peasants, gamekeepers, and mourned the dependable cab-drivers, stable-boys, milkmen lost to analysts and psychological Westerns. Shell was not heartened by the general masculine failure.
What were the dressmakers doing? Why were all these massaged limbs bound in expensive cloth? A massage is not a caress. The intricate styles of hair, sleeves slit to show the arm, the children’s eyes redeemed in pencil, what for? Whom to delight? Dead under the velvet. The rooms cleverly appointed, the ancient designs on the wallpaper, furniture of taste, rescued Victorian opulence, what was it meant to enclose? The beginning was wrong. The coupling did not occur. It should grow from entwined bodies.
The bath filled up. She nursed her body in, squatting on her knees, then, spreading her hands over the surface of the water as one does over a heater in a cold room, she slid back, even wetting her hair, wholly given over to the warmth and the dainty clean smell of lemon soap.
9
The crowd mounted the stone steps quickly. Perhaps when they reached street level their lives would have changed, roads gold, different homes and families waiting.
Two men moved faster than the crowd and the crowd let them through. Their lives were not outside the tunnel.
Breavman climbed at another speed, studying graffiti, wondering what secretary he could separate for the afternoon from her office routine. He had nowhere to go. He had abandoned the lectures he usually attended at that hour ever since the famous professor had agreed to let him do the term thesis on Breavman’s own book.
“Stop!”
At least it sounded like stop. Breavman stopped but the command was not for him.
“Brother!”
He wished he understood their language. Why did he think he knew what the words were? The two men were fighting on the steps, wedging Breavman against the wall. He extracted his feet with difficulty, like someone stepping out of quicksand.
It took two seconds. They hugged each other tightly. There was a hollow grunt, Breavman could not be sure from which man. Then one stood up and ran. The other’s head hung over the edge of the step less muscularly than a head should. The throat was widely and deeply cut.
Several voices shrieked for the police. A man who had the air of a doctor kneeled beside the body, which was already soaked in blood, shook his head philosophically to indicate that he was used to this sort of thing, then got up and went away. His attention had quieted the crowd, which was now beginning to bottleneck the passage, but after he had disappeared for some moments the cries for the police were renewed.
Breavman thought he should do something. He took off his jacket, intending to cover the victim, not the face, perhaps the shoulders. But what for? You did this for shock. The slit throat was past shock. It was softly bleeding over the IRT steps at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. At exactly one o’clock in the afternoon. Poor lousy urban matador. The white-on-white tie nattily knotted. The brown and white shoes very pointed and recently polished.
Breavman folded the jacket over his arm. It would implicate him. The police would want to know why he draped his jacket over a corpse. A bloody jacket was not a good idea for a souvenir. Sirens from the street. The crowd began to break up and Breavman went with it.
A few blocks away Breavman reflected that two years before he would have done it. A small death, like discovering that you can no longer slip into old underwear or ting the bell with the wooden mallet.
Why wasn’t he thinking about the man?
Two years ago he would have dipped the jacket, made the gesture, connected himself with the accident. Was the ritual dissolving? Was this an advance from morbidity?
A vision of Nazi youth presented itself. Rows and rows of the gold heads filing past the assassinated soldier. They lowered their company flags into the wound and promised. Breavman swallowed bile.
A steady underground question persisted. Who was the man? Sometimes the question was obscured into Where did he buy the shoes? and From what corner did he flash them? Who was the man? Was he the man asleep in the subway at three in the morning dressed in a brand-new suit with cuff marks over the white part of his shoes? Did girls like his blue hair tonic? What shabby room did he step out of, glittering like the plastic madonna on the dresser? Who was the man? Where was he climbing? What was the quarrel, where was the girl, how much was the money? The knife into what water from what foggy bridge? Barry Fitzgerald and the rookie cop want to know everything.
Why wasn’t he thinking about the man?
Breavman supported himself against a trash basket and vomited. A Chinese waiter ran out of the restaurant.
“Do it up the street. People eat here.”
Puking clears the soul, he thought as he walked away. He was walking with all his body, which was newly light, easy with athletic promise. You’re filled with poison, it’s brewing in every pouch and hole and pocket of your insides, you’re a swamp, then the sickening miracle, sloof! And you’re empty, free, begin again your second cold clear chance, thank you, thank you.
The buildings, doorways, sidewalk cracks, city trees shone bright and precise. He was where he was, all of him, beside a drycleaning store, high on the smell of clean brown-wrapped clothes. He was nowhere else. In the
