Lucky Alan : And Other Stories (9780385539821) (2 page)

“Sorry?”

“That’s the first question.” He resumed his insinuating theatrical murmur.
“Are you sure you are really interested …”

I did my best with the question, told Blondy I thought anyone ought to feel a value in the continuity of the species, but he interrupted. “No, you,” he said. “How do
you
feel?”

“Yes, I’d be sad if there were no people.”

He leaped to the next question.
“Whom would you rather never have met?”

My only brush with Harold Pinter had been fiercely disappointing. I began to describe it. Blondy rushed me again.

“Would you like to have perfect memory?
Just answer the questions that interest you, Grahame.
If you had the power to put into effect things you consider right, would you do so against the wishes of the majority?”

“Look, Sigismund, what is this?”

“Are you convinced by your own self-criticism?”

“Too much, I’m afraid.”

“Are you conscious of being in the wrong in relation to
some other person (who need not necessarily be aware of it)? If so, does this make you hate yourself—or the other person?”

His voice was so entrancing that I suspected we were both entranced. He might as well have asked to read me poetry, for all that I was persuaded he wanted my replies. I said, “What about
you
, Sig? You answer this one.”

He nodded, raised his glass. “And hate myself for it.”

Again, I wondered if I heard the sound of a trap snapping shut. Had I delivered my designated line? Were we perhaps getting to the point?

“Who?” I asked.

“Alan Zwelish,” Blondy said.

*

Sigismund Blondy had known Alan Zwelish for several years, in the way of a Manhattan neighbor, repeatedly sighting a compelling face in passing instants as one or the other swerved from the street into the entrances of their buildings, which stood across and askew from each other, or in the same Chase ATM lobby on Seventy-ninth, or in the late-night Korean shop collecting, if you were Zwelish, a pack of cigarettes, or, if you were Blondy, a bottle of ginger beer or a packet of wasabi peanuts. Or, most stirringly, far from the block they shared, at adjacent bookstalls in Union Square on a hot Saturday noon, where they honored the strangeness of detecting each other so far afield
with a curt nod. That nod could have been the whole of it. But Blondy didn’t play by the Manhattan-neighbor rules. He was provocative, voluble, grabby. He collected life histories, he’d once bragged to me, of the block’s fleet of dog-walkers, maypoled in leashes on their way to the park, confused to be approached when nearly anyone else would switch pavements to get a berth from roiling terriers. Cooed at strollered babies until lonely Tibetan nannies, the invisible persons of Manhattan, practically swooned in his long arms. Blondy regaled waiters, too; I’d seen him do it.

Anyway, Alan Zwelish, short, muscled, his eyes sparkling with suspicion, sports coats pixied with dandruff, became a fascination. Bearded when Blondy first noticed him, Zwelish shaved within a year or so, revealing features younger and grimmer than Blondy had guessed, a knuckly chin and somewhat sensuous lips. Tenured-professorial in the pretentious facial hair, without it Zwelish was revealed to be no more than thirty-five. His Bogart smoking mannerisms seemed the result of mirror study and, like the renounced beard, an attempt to gain control of the lower portion of his face. Blondy watched this proud, drum-tight personality fidget past him on the street and began projecting; he couldn’t help it: an unfinished degree in journalism, concerned married sisters in New Jersey or Connecticut (but probably New Jersey), weights but no cardio, aggrieved blind dates,
Cigar Aficionado
and
Stereophile
, takeout menus, acres of porn.
What was positive was this: Zwelish owned his apartment, the basement of a co-oped town house, and made a living consulting on business software—these facts Blondy got out of Alan Zwelish, semi-voluntarily, the first time he introduced himself, on Seventy-eighth Street.

The next time they passed, Zwelish attempted to look the other way, as though offering up this information had been a paying of dues, and he could now revert to nodding acquaintance. No dice, not with Blondy, who launched one of his in-medias-res gambits (the equivalent, maybe, of a Max Frisch questionnaire): The parrots were missing, had Zwelish heard? What? Zwelish hadn’t ever seen the flock of green parrots, rumored to be pets escaped over the years, which congregated in certain trees on York Avenue at Seventy-seventh, around which you could hear a tropical cloud of parrot conversation? These birds were a totem of the neighborhood; it was essential Zwelish see them. But Blondy hadn’t managed to spot them for more than a week. Was Zwelish doing anything urgent at the moment, or would he join Blondy for a walk to search them out? Incredibly—or not, given Blondy’s charismatic sway—Zwelish excused himself for a moment to put his briefcase inside and take a leak, then rejoined Blondy, and they strolled together to York. It was a perfect afternoon, a temperate wind rebounding off the river. They found the parrots easily. (Whether they’d ever been missing at all Zwelish was left to wonder.)

Now the hard little man had been cracked open. As
Sigismund Blondy saw him, Zwelish walked in a fiery aura of loneliness, but Blondy had gotten inside the penumbra. Zwelish would grab Blondy on the street and describe family plights: the barely tolerated Passover at his—yes!—sister’s in New Jersey, the difficulty of properly liquidating his father’s gnarled-up assets, which were under his elderly mom’s watch. And brag, essentially. Was Blondy drinking the crap water that came out of the Seventy-eighth Street taps? He should install such-and-such purification system in his sink. Cash sitting in a money-market account was as good as thrown away; Zwelish was in certain arcane tech stocks and had also acquired a Motherwell print. Blondy was invited to an East Hampton guesthouse weekend? That place was hell, trust Zwelish. Zwelish’s high-school buddy had a place in the Berkshires, a better value. Blondy
rented
? Hopeless! Everything was a competition in which Blondy wouldn’t compete, saying, “Look at who you’re talking to, Alan. I’m like the parrots, just roosting here, decorating the area. I’d rather leave nothing behind but delicious memories.” Bohemian standards Zwelish wouldn’t ratify. “You’re a fool,” he’d say. “Yes,” Blondy agreed, “I’m a fool, exactly.” Zwelish narrowed his eyes. “But you don’t know how dangerous it is to be a fool. Dangerous to yourself and others.” Blondy thought, What others?

Possibly Zwelish meant the women. Sigismund Blondy, like any tall dissolute specimen, had women around him, in roles likely unclarified even to themselves: exes, friends,
liaisons. Zwelish witnessed a certain number of the comings and goings of this elegant flock, which culminated in an introduction at a First Avenue Greek diner during morning hours suggestive of an overnight visit, before collaring Blondy alone one day to say, “Okay, Sig, how do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Five different women I’ve seen you with in the past two months.”

“Friends, Alan, those are my friends.”

Zwelish crushed his cigarette under his running shoe, the way he wanted to stub out Blondy’s line of defense. “Don’t bullshit me. I see them lean into you. That’s not friends.”

“When you reach my age, women lean into you for a variety of reasons.”

“I could use some friends like that.”

Blondy felt he’d been offered a significant confidence. Insouciant as he was, he hadn’t ever felt that he could quite ask a man as unattractive as Zwelish how he made do. Before any tenderness broke out between them, however, Zwelish thrust a knife in. “I’ve seen you hitting on those illiterate babysitters, too. The whole block talks about it, you know.”

This prospect tipped Blondy back on his heels for an instant: that he, who prided himself on his panoramic insight into Seventy-eighth Street, could be under the microscope himself. And, using that instant, Zwelish made his escape.

*

A bruising friendship, if it was one. And, like Blondy and me at the movies, many weeks could pass between encounters. Did Blondy only fantasize that Zwelish peered out of his basement window slats deciding whether or not, on a given afternoon, he wanted to see Blondy? In any case, when they did meet, Zwelish generally seemed to have some willful challenge ready, as if he prepared with flash cards. “Not awake yet?” if he saw Blondy with coffee in the afternoon. “Never awake at all anymore,” Blondy would say, always willing to play the decrepit jester, the has-been, hoping he could un-push Zwelish’s buttons. “Want a job, Blondy? You should write an opera about Donald Trump. He’s what passes for a hero these days!” Blondy didn’t compose operas, but never mind. Still, after Zwelish’s initial remark they’d often fall into the earlier style of more relaxed banter. And Zwelish sometimes let his guard down and complained, obscurely, about “modern urban women.” He’d only gloss the topic, and Blondy didn’t press at the sore point. Zwelish seemed to know how vulnerable Zwelish wanted to get.

“Can’t you get one of those babysitters to do your laundry for you?” Zwelish said one day when he saw Blondy humping a Santa Clausian bag to the Chinese dry cleaner. Zwelish seemed particularly keen and chipper, and rolled up his sleeve to show off a nicotine patch. More bragging. He explained that he’d already stepped down two patch levels, after fifteen years of pack-a-day smoking.

“I never thought of this before,” said Blondy, “but if you
wanted
to smoke but were having trouble getting started, the patch could really do the trick, couldn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you wanted to be a smoker,” Blondy said, explicating the joke. “You could step up instead of down.” Zwelish brought out his silly side; he couldn’t help it. “Once you get to the top level, you tear off that patch and—voilà!—you’d want a cigarette
urgently
.”

“Fuck you,” Zwelish said, and walked away. His self-improvements were apparently no laughing matter.

Yet Sigismund Blondy, being who he was, found Zwelish all the more precious for his touchiness. He constituted a test that Blondy, who’d sledded on pure charm through so many controversies, couldn’t pass. He adored Zwelish for causing him, at this late date, to want to do better, try harder, give more.

It was months later that the real opportunity came: Alan Zwelish’s definitive self-renovation, one that Blondy instantly vowed to treat only reverently, beatifically. Zwelish returned from a mysterious trip in possession of an Asian wife. Blondy heard it first from another neighbor (shades of “the whole block knows”), who included a nosy speculation as to whether the union had been made by online advertisement or some other mechanical arrangement, before he saw her for himself. From Vietnam, it was revealed when they met on the street, and tiny enough to make Zwelish look tall. Doris, Zwelish introduced her
as, though he later confided that her name was something else, Do Lun or Du Lan. Bright dark eyes and features so precise they seemed tooled. At this first meeting Blondy clasped Zwelish’s hand, took his elbow, gave his warmest congratulations. Almost bent to kiss Doris, but thought better. She was too self-contained and skittish, a cipher. Zwelish pulled her close to him, seeming for once immune to hurt, a being formed only of pride and delight. Blondy was a part of the family, if only because at the moment anyone, even a passing stranger, would have been. Blondy watched them disappear into the basement apartment, Zwelish gallantly rushing past Doris to unlock the gate, and felt a disproportionate happiness, one he suspected he’d have to make an effort to conceal.

Zwelish never attacked Blondy now, his sarcasm apparently totally evaporated, and if Blondy ever experimented with a teasing joke (calling Doris “Mrs. Z”), it seemed to go right over Zwelish’s head. Or under it, as if the man were floating. They’d greet each other heartily, with or without Doris in Zwelish’s tow. It was as though Zwelish had advertised the director to Doris in advance as a sterling friend, a local pillar, and then so invested in the notion that he forgot his old wariness. Doris, when she was along, watched carefully. Her English wasn’t hopeless, once you pierced the gauze of the almost total deference she showed her husband, never speaking without checking his eyes for cues. Who knew what else she was capable of, what life she’d led before, what life she’d
expected coming here. Zwelish, who worked increasingly from home, who made fewer consulting trips out of town, kept her attached at the hip.

Soon enough Doris’s pregnancy was noticeable on her scrawny frame. Her posture was too good to hide it past the third month. Zwelish accepted these congratulations, too, but distantly. This was a cold winter, everyone battened into woolen layers and readily excused from dawdling in the open, and Zwelish and his expectant young wife were more and more like figures in a snow globe, viewable but uncontactable from the human realm. They didn’t seem happy or unhappy, just curled into each other, whispering on the street, a totally opaque domestic unit. Blondy couldn’t get a rise or anything else out of Zwelish, and I knew Blondy well enough to feel how this irked him. It explained the reckless choice he made. Likely, given his history with Zwelish already, Blondy knew it was reckless, though he did it wholly in gentleness and out of sheer enthusiasm. One day when Doris was five or six months along and spring had broken out on the street, Blondy ran into her alone as she returned, waddling slightly, from the Korean market. He insisted on carrying her plastic bags to the door of the basement apartment.

This was bad enough, really, since it wasn’t beyond Zwelish’s established range to feel this as a rebuke for not having accompanied Doris to the store. But worse, much worse, at the door Blondy reached under Doris’s sweater and T-shirt, not without asking first, and cupped his palm underneath the globe that burgeoned there. He
did it elegantly—nothing but elegance, with a woman especially, was possible for Blondy. Doris wasn’t jarred. Blondy didn’t linger. Just felt it and murmured something about “a miracle,” and something else about “lucky Alan.” Asked “Boy or girl?” and Doris told him: “Boy.”