New Jersey Noir (10 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Miss Crawford went home and turned on the radio while she baked a sweet potato pie. She listened to WBGO because of the old-school jazz they played, which she and her Teddy had always enjoyed, and then the news came on. It told about the alleged gang members arrested, most of them in possession of weapons, just that very morning. The police suspected these young men of dealing drugs, though they couldn’t prove that yet. All very well, thought Miss Crawford as the radio went back to music, but those guns every one of them were carrying was the real problem for those boys, and that problem was very bad. Being caught with a gun like that was a sentence for sure. How long it was going to be, well, that depended on if you had anything to say that the police wanted to hear. Those boys would be racing to sell each other out, starting already.
The timer dinged and Miss Crawford took the pie out of the oven and set it to cool. Then she settled herself in front of the TV with the cat on her lap. The new mayor was going to be making a speech, about how the people of Newark were taking the city back. Miss Crawford wanted to hear it.
Black coal with a thunderous shush
plunging into the clearly evil-inhabited coal bin.
The black furnace into whose maw
you could feed paper to watch it curl to black char.
The hats women wore with black, mysterious veils,
even your mother. The “mascara” she’d apply
more meticulously than she did anything else.
With her black lashes she was almost somebody else.
The incomprehensible marks on blackboards at school
you conquered without knowing quite how.
The black ink in the inkwell. The metal pens
with blots that diabolically slid from their nibs.
Black slush, after the blizzard had passed
and the diesel buses and trucks were fuming again,
but you still remembered how blackly lovely
the branches of trees looked in new snow.
The gunk on the chain of your bike.
The black stuff always under your nails.
Where did it come from, how to get it out?
Even between your toes sometimes there was black.
The filthy tires hung on hooks in the garage-store
we had to pass through to get to our
shul.Black Book of Europe
, first proof of the war on Jews—illicit volume, as forbidden to Jewish children as porn.
Black people the states in the South began to send up,
keeping what they needed for cheap labor and maids
and exporting the rest: a stream of discarded humans,
with the manufacturing plants just then closing down.
The photo of black children in the ’20s, frolicking
on the bench of the Lincoln statue by the courthouse.
I took the bus once to go sit in its lap,
his
lap:how kind he looked, how surprisingly hard his bronze lap.
The other statue,
Captive’s Choice
, in a park:the girl kidnapped by Indians who forgets she’s white,
then, “saved,” gives up Indian husband and children.
Who decided it should have been that, and there?
The first black kids in our school, fine with me,
because Clarence Murphy, sixteen in fourth grade,
stopped beating me up because I’d killed Christ
and raged instead with even more venom at them.
I was afraid of Clarence but not of black people,
except that day on the bus: the sweat-stench of men
who’d worked hard and not had time yet to change.
Though I already knew it was shameful, I fled.
“Blackballs” to keep Jews, Italians, and Irish,
then naturally blacks, out of the country clubs
in Maplewood and Montclair. The unfunny jokes
about signs on their gates:
No Dogs, Niggers, or Jews
.Our gangster hero, Longie Zwillman, who had a black car;
so did our mayors—bought off, we were told by “interests.”
Irish, Italian, finally at last a black mayor:
all the bought-off ones with their Cadillacs of corruption.
Thick soot on the bricks of the mills by the tracks,
smoke billowing, then extinguished forever.
Rivers with rainbows of oil on their surface,
their beds eternally black venomous chemical sludge.
Miles of black turnpike and parkway pavement
scrolled out onto the soil of the no-longer farms.
You could speed now from one place to another
and not see the slums, the factories in broken-eyed ruin.
Everywhere ruin—did nobody see it arriving?
Urban flight, urban decay, shopping centers and malls,
the department stores downtown shuttered,
then small businesses, theaters, and the rest.
The finally unrecognizable city, done in by us all.
Only the ever benevolent Lincoln, unblackened
by time or pollution, emblem of promise and hope,
patiently waited, patiently waits.
I
met Lola on the PATH, the train that goes under the Hudson River, a thought I tried to deny twice a day when I rode it back and forth to Hoboken, the idea of the tunnel suddenly sprouting a leak, water shattering subway windows, pouring in, drowning me, always on the edge of my mind, which is why I focused on everything else.
Lola was sitting across from me, head buried in a paperback, one of those romance novels with a girl in the arms of a brawny he-man. Her black-red nails tap-tap-tapping the back cover had me hypnotized until she looked up, blue eyes lined with kohl, dark arching brows as if she were about to ask a question though she wasn’t looking at me, just reacting to the sound of the subway doors opening and closing, but it was enough, a moment, a connection. She went back to her book and I noticed the gold band on her finger, which was disappointing, not like I was thinking we’d get married or anything, but I’d have preferred she was single, which makes things easier.
She was a little younger than me, maybe thirty though I’m no good at ages, no good at numbers of any kind, which is why they never let me do the measuring at the place where I build made-to-order stretchers for successful artists, which I don’t mind, I like making them—I’ve always been good with my hands, and it’s quiet work, just me and two other guys, and I take pride in it, sanding the edges and making sure the corners are perfectly square because there’s nothing worse than a lopsided painting—though sometimes I get a little resentful that I spend my days building stretchers for other artists, but that’s life, right?
That first night, Lola was wearing gold sandals, toenails painted the same black-red, and she had really nice feet, nice legs too, bare because it was a hot day though the PATH was frigid. Every once in a while she rubbed her hand up and down her legs like she was trying to warm them, which was even more hypnotizing than her book tapping.
She had a good figure too, her top loose but made of some slinky fabric that outlined her breasts, and her skirt was short enough to see her thighs, which were thin but muscular. I thought about asking her to model for me, a line I’d once used that had worked—women are so easily flattered—but I didn’t think she’d go for it, being married and all, and I couldn’t come up with anything else, I hadn’t prepared and I’m not really good with girls even though some say I’m very good looking.
When the train stopped at Hoboken I knew she’d get off—I didn’t see her as the kind who’d live in Jersey City, and no way Newark. I waited for her to go past me, we were only a few inches apart and I could smell her perfume, something flowery but not too sweet, and I breathed it in trying to hold onto it, and then someone in front of her stopped short and she backed into me, her perfume in my nose and her hair tickling my cheek for just a second, and she said, “Oh, sorry,” and I saw it in slow motion, her red lips yawning the words,
OOOHHHHH SSSSOOOORRRRYYYY
, and I never wanted the moment to end. So I followed her.
It was still light out, a mist coming off the Hudson River like a veil in front of the Manhattan skyline. She headed away from the water toward the main drag, Washington Street, which had become gentrified over the past years. Hoboken was sort of a dump, famous as the birthplace of Frank Sinatra and not much else, when I first moved there after graduate school because I couldn’t afford Manhattan rents, not if I wanted a studio, which I did, and I have a pretty good one, my own building in fact, a small brick one next door to Pablo’s Towing Station on the furthest-back street in town, still not developed, a dark lonely stretch, which suits me, and practically no one knows I live in the building because I’ve done nothing to distinguish it, left the rusted steel door the way it was the day I moved in, and I’ve yet to clean the broken glass or ever-accumulating beer cans from the two-by-four plot of ground out front, so the place looks deserted unless you happen to see the lights go on and off, but there’s really no one around to see that either.
She went into a liquor store, the yuppie one, not the wino one, and I watched her through the glass choosing two bottles of red wine and quickly turned away when she came out, then followed her again, leaving just enough distance between us.
She lived in a renovated brownstone on a quiet side street, a really nice one, so I figured she had money.
After she went inside I waited a few minutes then checked the mailbox. There was a letter addressed to
Mr. & Mrs. Moretti
, and a postcard, which is how I learned her name, Lola.
Lola. Lola. Lola. Lola. Lola.
I folded it into my pocket, went across the street and stood under the awning of a beauty salon that was closed, and waited until it got dark and a light went on in an upstairs window, and I watched Lola slowly peel her top off, and even after the light went out her image burned in my mind and I stayed up the whole night making one drawing after another of her, naked, framed by the window, smudging the charcoal with my fingers to capture the soft swell of her breasts.
The next day I stayed home from work and made paintings based on the drawings. I stopped just before six p.m., changed out of my paint clothes, put on a clean shirt, walked over to the PATH, and sure enough there she was.
This time she went into a little gourmet shop and I followed, brushed past her in the condiment aisle, keeping my head down inhaling her perfume, and on the way out I accidentally-on-purpose banged into her and she dropped her bag and I said I was sorry and helped her pick everything up and offered to carry her bag home but she just smiled and said, “No biggie,” and this time I didn’t have to follow her because I knew exactly where she was going, so I waited, then went and stood under the awning, and when it got dark she did the same thing—undressed in front of the window, a little slower this time—and I thought I’d go crazy and was even thankful when the light went out so I could go home and make more drawings.
The next day I followed her from the PATH, and the day after I just waited under the awning until she came home. I didn’t want to rush it, didn’t want it over too soon. I brought my camera with the telephoto lens and took some pictures of her in her window, half naked, and used them for more paintings, which were starting to fill my studio.
It was later in the week that I finally saw the husband, pinstriped suit, gold-tassel loafers, a lot older than I expected, a lot older than Lola too, at least fifty, maybe more, balding, overweight, a surprise and no question in my mind that she’d married him for money, disappointing as I’d grown to think more highly of her, but still, I forgave her.
Over the next few weeks I got their routine down. Lola almost always came home by six; the husband not until eight, and some nights not at all, so maybe he traveled or stayed in the city if he worked late, my guess Wall Street, which was very convenient to Hoboken. One evening, I went over to where the ferries come in from Wall Street, and there he was with a scowl on his face like he was pissed off about something, like he didn’t have a gorgeous wife and tons of money, which annoyed me because some people don’t know how lucky they are.
A few times I followed Lola into the city. I was curious to see what she did all day. It turned out she just took long walks along Fifth Avenue or in Central Park or went shopping in fancy stores like Saks or went to art galleries or museums, which made me like her even more; but I got to thinking she was lonely and how happy we’d be together and how she could be my full-time muse and I’d put her on a pedestal and she’d never be lonely again.
One night, a truck delivered a painting, a big one covered in bubble wrap, and when it got dark I went right up to her windows and peeked in and could see it leaning against the living room wall, an abstract, which I don’t like, but figured I’d win Lola over to portraiture once she saw all the ones I’d made of her.