Lucky Alan : And Other Stories (9780385539821) (3 page)

Zwelish, who’d heard their voices and come to the window, now rushed out, unlocked the gate, and pulled Doris inside. He seemed to have some imprecation caught in his throat, which produced a kind of angry hiccup as he glared up at Blondy. Then, with his wife, he was gone.

Conveniently, Zwelish was alone when he next met Blondy on the street. He lowered his shoulder as they came near each other, and when Blondy said his name, he squared and delivered a sour look. “What do you want from me?” he asked Blondy. “Nothing you wouldn’t want to give” was Blondy’s reply.

“Why’d you call me ‘lucky’?” Zwelish asked.

“What?”

“ ‘Lucky Alan.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Blondy said, exhausted at last.

“Then why don’t you just keep your distance.” Zwelish exited on the line.

Now came the deep valley in their relations, though Blondy somehow never doubted it would eventually be crossed. Weeks or a month could go by without their passing on the street, and words were never spoken. Blondy was busy then, in the effort that included our own first meeting, the Koch plays. The boy was born, and the little triad was sighted on Seventy-eighth Street, always
self-reliant and self-contained, always in a hurry. And, finally, Blondy uncovered the existence of the “whole block”; it consisted of an older woman (meaning, I guessed, Blondy’s age) living in Blondy’s own building, whom Blondy mainly identified with a boring dispute over recycling, and who, it turned out, was eagerly running him down to absolutely anyone, from the market Koreans to new tenants; to the dog-walkers she’d interrogate after their talks with Blondy, as if deprogramming them; to, presumably, Zwelish. One of the dog-walkers, the most garrulous and multifariously connected (he walked the Jack Russell and the corgis and the aging dachshund), spilled it all to Blondy at last. And also said that Zwelish himself had once halted on the sidewalk to take part in the latest Blondy-trashing session. That Zwelish had said he’d never trusted Blondy, was “always just playing along,” whatever that meant. As though Blondy’s affection were so pernicious it had to be negotiated with.

In the earlier months of this stalemate, Blondy had spotted Zwelish with or without his new family four or five times, then Doris alone with the boy in a stroller two or three others. Blondy hadn’t noticed to what degree he’d pridefully withdrawn from the daily life of the block (this would have been the period of the great escalation in my multiplex encounters with Blondy, when we most frequently “accidentally” rendezvoused and ended up at wine bars) until the garrulous dog-walker stopped him and delivered the news: Alan Zwelish had died, suddenly, of an inoperable brain tumor, discovered only weeks before
it killed him. Doris and the child had inherited whatever he had, and an insurance claim was going to keep them in the apartment across the street. Here was the full horror of a relationship that both relied on chance meetings and was subject to utter estrangement: what you could miss in an interval. In this case, the whole end.

There was only one possible choice at the news. Blondy rushed to the apartment to see Doris. She let him in. Entering Zwelish’s lair for the first time ever, seeing—yes!—the high-end audio equipment and the pile of free weights, as well as the framed Motherwell, and most of all the one-year-old playing in a folding crib littered with the plush toys he suspected were Zwelish’s handpicked tokens of adoration, made Blondy’s heart righteous, as if confirmation of his old guesses proved the claims Zwelish had always refused. Doris sat across from him, rigid in her chair, eyes dry. She offered him nothing, and he didn’t approach her, or the child—this wasn’t a visit, it was a reckoning. He started with the only words to start with, “I’m sorry,” meant as an overture to the explanations he wanted to offer whether Doris cared or understood. But she had a clarification of her own to make, one that threw his motives into irrelevancy.

“I’m glad he’s gone.”

Blondy hadn’t misheard. Her syntax was exact and unmistakable, despite the accent. The sentiment laid bare.

“Why?”

“He never let me go anywhere.” Doris’s tone was angry, the feeling fresh. “We only fighted all day.”

Blondy just nodded, needed no prompting to accept the truth of this account.

“I didn’t love Alan. Now we”—she turned, to make Blondy understand she included the boy—“have this. Much better.”

Blondy began weeping, openly, pouring out stuff he didn’t know was inside, matters of his fear of death generally, as well as rage at Alan Zwelish for having pushed him away and at himself for having let himself be pushed.

“You cry,” Doris said, not cruelly.

*

Having been chosen or volunteered to receive the confession from Blondy that Doris Zwelish had preempted, I fastened on the real-estate implications. They seemed to me not inconsiderable, given Blondy’s Seventy-eighth Street rent stabilization. “Your response was to move from the block?”

“I couldn’t confront the recycling lady, to begin with,” Blondy said. “Let alone watch Doris raising the kid before my eyes—what if he came out looking like Alan? The block wasn’t mine anymore. I was like a zombie—they’d be right to shun me after a while. I was embarrassed for myself, but also for Zwelish. Nobody could forget him if I didn’t go.”

“So it was altruistic, moving away?”

“
Necessary
, Grahame.”

Again I felt a paranoiac certainty that in telling his
tale Sigismund Blondy had enlisted me in a theatrical invention—cast me in a role—for the benefit of an unknown audience, perhaps only himself. There was no Alan Zwelish, or Alan Zwelish had never married or died: The whole episode was confabulation. For an instant I wanted to go to the library and dig for an obituary. But then I knew that the story was true. Inventing a smoker who’d quit and then succumbed to cancer was beneath Blondy. No, my feeling of unreality was a sympathetic response, not a clue to a lie: I’d been infected with Blondy’s own fear, that grandiosity had made his human self specious—a
zombie
. He fled Seventy-eighth Street afraid he’d made it a stage for theatrics. In his nightmares he might have heard this accusation, delivered in the recycling lady’s voice: not that he was molesting nannies but that he treated others as figures in a shadow play.

The moment I suspected this horror I wanted to assuage it, by speaking of his true and inexpressible feelings for Zwelish. “You don’t choose who you love, Sigismund.”

Blondy looked relieved that I was chasing a moral in his fable, rather than staring with him into the black hole of his personality. “I like that,” he mused. “You don’t choose who you love. Or who loves you.
That
was Alan’s problem.”

“No wonder he was pissed. Whatever he was searching for, nothing could have made him expect
you
.”

“Ha!”

I’d have done anything for Blondy at that moment,
and, correspondingly, I loathed Alan Zwelish, though I knew there was more Zwelish than Blondy in me, which was likely the reason I was seated here. I hated Zwelish for showing Blondy death, just as I’d hate a teenager for informing a five-year-old that Santa Claus was a fake. I hoped Blondy would live to a thousand, for revenge.

“Let us assume that you have never killed another human being. How do you account for it?”

“Sorry?”

“That’s the next question.” Blondy had unfolded his photocopies again. “Or this:
Which would you rather do: die or live on as a healthy animal? Which animal?
”

This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences—nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled, not destroyed.” At the explosion of such a
sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.

We worked in bookstores, the only thing to do. Nobody who didn’t—and that included every one of our customers—knew what any of the volumes throbbing along those shelves was worth, not remotely. Nor did the bookstores’ owners. Clea and I were custodians of a treasury of sentences much bigger on the inside than on the outside. Though we mostly handled the books only by their covers (or paged briefly through to ascertain that no dunce had striped the pages yellow or pink with a Hi-Liter), we communed deeply with them, felt certain that only we deserved to abide with them. Any minute we’d read them all cover to cover, it was surely about to happen. Meanwhile, every customer robbed us a little. At the cash registers we spoke sentences tailored to convey our disdain, in terms so subtle it was barely detectable. If our customers blinked a little at the insults we embedded in our thank-yous, we believed they just might be worthy of the marvels their grubby dollars entitled them to bear away.

We disparaged modern and incomplete forms: gormless and garbled jargon, graffiti, advertising, text-messaging.
No sentence conveyed by photons or bounced off satellites had ever come home intact. Punctuation! We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day. Erotically enjambed in our loft bed, Clea patrolled my utterances for subject, verb, predicate, as a chef in a five-star kitchen would minister a recipe, ensuring that a soufflé or sourdough would rise. A good brave sentence (“I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring”) might jolly Clea to instant climax. We’d rise from the bed giggling, clutching for glasses of cold water that sat in pools of their own sweat on bedside tables. The sentences had liberated our higher orgasms, nothing to sneeze at. Similarly, we were also sure that sentences of the right quality could end this hideous endless war, if only certain standards were adopted at the higher levels. They never would be. All the media trumpeted the administration’s lousy grammar.

But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody else’s dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues. We barely glanced at our wall-scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips we’d find in muddy clogs in
storm drains, tangled with advertising flyers, unheeded. Our manuscripts? Those were unspeakable secrets, kept not only from the world but from each other. My pages were shameful, occluded everywhere with xxxxxx’s of regret. I scurried to read Clea’s manuscript every time she left the apartment but never confessed that I even knew it existed. Her title was
Those Young Rangers Thought Love Was a Scandal Like a Bald White Head
. Mine was
I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind Their Instruments
.

Others might hail kings of beer or burgers—we bowed to the King of Sentences. There was just one. We owned his titles in immaculate firsts and tattered reading copies and odd variant editions. It thrilled us to see the pedestrian jacket copy and salacious cover art on his early mass-market paperbacks: to think that he’d once been considered fodder for dime-store carousels! The newest editions of the titles he’d allowed to be reprinted (four early novels had been suppressed from republication) were splendidly austere, their jackets, from the small presses that published him now, bearing text only, no graven images. The progress of his editions on our shelf was like a cartoon of evolution, a slug crawling from the surf to become a mammal, a monkey, and then at last a hairless noble fellow gazing into the future.

The King of Sentences gave no interviews, taught nowhere, condescended to appear at no panels or symposia. His tastes, hobbies, and heartbreaks were unknown, and we extrapolated them from his books at our peril. His
digital footprint was pale: people like that didn’t care about people like him. Google, for what it was worth, favored a famous painter of wildlife scenes—beaver dams, heron hideaways—with the same name. The King of Sentences only wrote, beavering away himself on a dam of quintessence, while wholly oblivious of public indifference and of a sales record by now likely descending to rungs occupied by poets. His author photograph, identical on twenty years of jackets and press clippings until it stopped circulating at all, arrested him somewhere in the mid-sixties, turtlenecked, holding a cocktail glass forever. His last cocktail, maybe.

In the same loft where we entangled, Clea and I drove ourselves mad reading the King of Sentences’s books aloud, by candlelight, when we ought to have been sleeping. We’d tear the book from each other’s hands for the pleasure of running his words like gerbils in the habitrails of our own mouths. We’d alternate chapters, pages, paragraphs, finally sentences, at last agree to read him in unison. He could practically hear us as we intoned his words, we’d swear they reached his ears. But not really. Really, we were vowing to ourselves and to each other that we’d make a day trip in search of the King of Sentences, that we’d flush him out, propel ourselves into his company and confidence, buoy him with our love and bind ourselves (and our secret manuscripts, oh yeah!) to his greatness. We each had what the other needed, of this we were positive. Maybe we’d watch him write. Maybe he’d watch us dance, or fuck, who knew? We’d buy him lunch. He was
surely mortal enough for lunch. He’d want us at least for lunch.