The shop was one of those miraculous closets that occupied gaps between the city’s plusher retail offerings, with only enough room inside for a counter along one wall and a corresponding corridor wide enough for a single customer. The tobacco was under glass, and stacked to the ceiling on shelves behind the register; cartons of cigarettes were stacked high on the counter and to the ceiling on shelves behind John. From somewhere among the boxes a transistor radio played Ravel. The owner yelled, I’ll call ya back!
Never work with the public, had been Albert’s advice to John. The old man had got that much right.
Evening, John said.
The man raised his considerable eyebrows without uttering a sound.
Sir Walter Raleigh Aromatic in a pouch, John said.
John heard the glass door slide, and the man’s arm appeared in the case at knee-level, felt around for the blue pouch, his eyes on the ceiling, upper lip curled slightly, the face of a doctor conducting a digital probe.
A sharp medicine, the man said.
I suppose, John said, opening his wallet.
A physician for all diseases and miseries, the man added, standing, stabbing at the cash register’s gray keys.
John held out the money.
Sir Raleigh’s final words, addressed to the axe that separated his head from his shoulders, the man said, taking the money, stabbing the keys again, the cash drawer shooting into his gut.
Is that so? John said.
A poet to the end, the man said.
This was the problem with people, John thought. They were always springing traps to make you listen, but they never listened in turn, like a preacher in a pulpit.
You don’t say, John said.
Ya, the shopkeeper said, waiting. When John only stared dumbly back at him, the man relented and dropped the money into his hand. This pleased John, to have broken him, and sympathy surged up to fill the empty space annoyance had vacated. What did this old man have but his little brown box of a store and someone to yell at on the phone? Why spoil his fun? And where else did John have to be, and who else did he have to talk to? But he couldn’t think of how to make it right, and he dropped the change into his pants pocket, slipped the pouch of tobacco into his coat, and said, Good night. The man’s finger was already in the phone’s rotary wheel. Didn’t matter whose ear he was chewing, as long as someone was forced to listen. Up crept a bitter snarl into John’s throat, a wild desire to tell the old man to shut the fuck up for once in his life. What a pain in the ass he must be to his family, alternately barking disapproval and dispensing unsolicited lectures on subjects useless and obscure. Cuts of tobacco, biographies of colonial governors, the history of the Tariff Act. If he’s so goddamn smart, what’s he doing running a smoke shop? Brains didn’t get you very far, not in this world, did they, pal?
John paused at the door and took his time arranging his scarf. All he needed was to catch the old man out, all he needed was a touch of spark to tinder and he could give the guy a piece of his mind. He’d be doing the world a favor. He listened to the rip and burr of the wheel as the man dialed. This city was a petty tyrant’s paradise, its citizens ever open to assault from distemperate delivery guys and short-fused butchers, the asinine ministrations of bagel shop proprietors.
He couldn’t linger any longer. In or out.
Louise? Louise? Put your mother on, the shopkeeper said.
John was ready. The speech was writing itself. The man’s accent—Louweese? Louweese?—was an assault, the conversion of an innocent wisp of a word into a boot-clad lout.
John had struggled in diction class with Edith Braun, the German octogenarian who taught from a nubby green recliner, perspective rendering her face the same size as the oblong soles of her size-four feet, the student forced to sing directly at that oval trinity because Braun was deaf and corrected pronunciation by eye. John’s exercises for her were abominations, his mouth a flopping mess, and he’d drilled hours a day to adopt a stage voice that was part Olivier, part machine, and in the end wholly unnatural. He’d become, in the process, as intolerant as Braun of imperfect pronunciation.
Hello? Nora, is that you, love?
The word thumped John in the chest. Love, rolled flat as dough. He glared through the glass door. February, whore of a month. This weather, the city’s punishment for glib April, when the sidewalks flooded with people concussed by the air and sun, incapable of walking a straight line, dumbly following their noses toward the new grass in Sheep Meadow, the Great Lawn. February was when everything died. Even January offered up empty blue skies, but February was a dark, Norse month of ice and cold.
Hold on, the man said into the phone. Do you need something, captain?
John raised his hand no and went out. The new snow fringed the dirt around the skinny black tree trunks, frosted the manhole covers, telephone booths, clung loosely to black-coated shoulders and the crowns of men’s hats. Unless he looked into the streetlights he couldn’t see it coming down, but he knew it was there. He pulled his collar tight and turned downtown.
19.
Sal Fumoso ran only one film a day at the decommissioned Penn Yards YMCA. He spliced reels and taped them end to end in a single continuous loop that ran on a platter system, like a celluloid cat’s cradle. You could watch an entire film six, seven times in a sitting. No intermissions.
