The Caveman's Valentine (5 page)

“Can we move on? The slop pot issue—”

“You’re agendizing, Linda. We’re not done with P.J.’s staring.”

“Yeah, but I’m sick of hauling other people’s slops! You hear me, Albert? I’m fed up with hauling your slops!”

“
My
slops?”

“Tuesdays
you’re
supposed to haul the slop pot!”

“BUT IT’S NOT MY
SHIT
! I DON’T EVEN SHIT HERE!”

“THAT’S A FUCKING LIE! I’VE SEEN YOU!”

“WILL SOMEBODY GET THE BRATS OUT OF HERE!”

“SEE, THEY’RE
MY
TITS, OK, P.J.? SO GET YOUR EYES OFF OF THEM!”

Romulus stepped in quietly. They all looked up—this circle of fiery eyes under a naked bulb. The wire for the bulb went out the window and over to the next building.

“Caveman!” said someone.

“Yo, Caveman, tell us about The Guy with No Face!”

“Stuyvesant! What’s that old fucker Stuyvesant up to?”

“How’re the Y-rays tonight, Caveman? Bad out there tonight?”

“Tell us about Homeowner’s Pride!”

“Give us a fucking tirade, man!”

Romulus scanned the eyes, spotted Matthew’s. Matthew was sitting against the wall, outside the circle, with a demeanor of utter catatonia.

“Matthew.”

Matthew got up and came to the door. Romulus gave the group a smile before he led Matthew out.

“Rage on, people.”

O
ut in the hall by the grime-frosted window, a seep of gray light. The sound of water dripping from the snow-melt. Romulus said quietly:

“Matthew, they say he froze to death.”

Matthew shook his head. “He was murdered.”

“Yeah, right. But they say there’s no evidence.”

“They just don’t give a shit. There’s a videotape, Rom!”

“Maybe there
used
to be. But I guess when Leppenraub killed your man, he must have got the tape, too.”

“I bet not every copy.”

“There’s another copy?”

“Rom, listen—when Leppenraub was doing all this sadistic shit to Scotty, there were other guys there—and there was this one guy who was running the camera. Scotty said this guy didn’t seem to be
into
it, you know? He just made the movie like he was doing what he was told.”

“What was his name?”

“Scotty never told me his name. He just told me that one day this guy slipped him a manila envelope. ‘I made a copy for you,’ he says. ‘Just in case you ever need it.’ And that was the tape—that’s how Scotty got hold of it, all that sick stuff.”

“But Scotty never showed it to you?”

“Uh-uh. He said he was hiding it somewhere. Somewhere far off, safe.”

“And that other guy?”

“The guy that gave him the tape? Well, right after that is when Leppenraub kicked Scotty out. He never saw the guy again.”

“So if we could
find
the guy . . .”

“Maybe . . . Oh, damn, Rom, I’m crying again. I can’t stop crying, Rom, I gotta stop crying.”

“Where do we look for the guy?”

“I don’t know. How am I supposed to know something like that? Ask the cops. Ask Leppenraub.”

“Yeah. Right. That’s about it, Matthew.”

They stood and listened to the bustle and commerce of the echoes. Romulus said:

“I mean that’s it. You’d have to go up there, right? To Leppenraub’s farm. I mean, you’d have to meet the murderer in his lair, and get him to
cooperate
somehow. You’d have to be fucking crazy.”

“Yeah.”

Then Matthew gave him a look.

Romulus shook his head. “Oh no, not me. I’m paranoid—that’s a
special
type of crazy. Not good for this kind of work, uh-uh. No, this . . . this takes the kind of crazy that thinks it’s
sane.
”

A
ll the way back home the temperature kept climbing. Though without spirit, just climbing dull-footed into a drear drizzle.

Romulus got back to the cave and sat there in the dark, and zapped the remote control on his TV set.

Since the set had been disemboweled before he had found it, and since it wasn’t hooked up to anything, it took a while to warm up. The images came in blurry, ghosted.

Romulus watched, and munched. In a bag he had Doritos crumbs and shrimp scampi and hunks of somebody’s wedding cake, and extracts from an arugula-and-tuna salad. All gleaned from some generous cans in front of 28 Corbin Plaza. He popped tidbits of this compost into his mouth as if they were popcorn.

The images on the TV started to add up.

They turned into a movie starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. It was set in the fifties, but it had been made in the sixties and it was snappish and airy and callow.

The movie was called
Prodigy.

Steve McQueen played a young music student at Juilliard. His family was poor, from the Bronx, but they were strivers. The parents were tough and demanding. No coarseness of speech, no dialect, was permitted about the house, and Steve McQueen’s older brothers were all embarking upon promising careers. Steve’s girlfriend—the Ali MacGraw part—burned up the screen with her beauty. The script was dumb but the music—the pieces the young student composed and played on the piano—these were strong and strange.

So, was this movie the biography of an actual composer? You couldn’t tell. No names were used.

Though there were hints that perhaps the Steve McQueen character was in fact supposed to be a young black man. At one point it was let drop that his great-grandfather had been a slave. And when the young composer wanted kicks, he went to Harlem, where he was treated like family. Also, at times it was flashed on the bottom of the screen that this movie had been

DECOLORIZED FOR POPULAR APPEAL

The young composer’s music was moving but destructive. He’d take sappy pop tunes and shake them till they cracked open and the syrup poured out of them, till they were rattling carcasses, but bone-lovely. Some of his peers at Juilliard thought he would be the greatest composer of the age. What a joyful jam his life was, and how sharp, mordant, and loving was Ali MacGraw!

But then came a shot of Stuyvesant’s tower—played, of course, by the Chrysler Building—and a beam of Y-rays shooting out from it.

Cut to Stuyvesant in his vast aquamarine office up at the top. Stuyvesant played himself. He wore a white cowl, and he had no face at all. His fingers rested on a glowing globe before him. He was receiving Y-ray reports on Steve McQueen.

He saw that the young man’s music was making a mockery of the
American Heartfelt.
He worried that the
Perfectly Real and Good
was being undermined.

He muttered something.

And right away Ali MacGraw got pregnant. Steve McQueen married her, left Juilliard, and went to work in the Domino Sugar plant in Brooklyn. Domino Sugar was owned by a holding company that was held by Stuyvesant’s lawyers, and they saw to it that Steve McQueen’s life was hell. He got angry and poured Domino Sugar into the machinery. He was fired. He got a job as a pianist, playing dinner music at a restaurant. He said to the patrons, “Here’s ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’ for all you mindless racist scum.” He was fired. Ali MacGraw came and begged his boss, and her eyes flashed and she looked like a bird of prey, and the boss took him on again. But he did things to “The Impossible Dream” that the patrons found unbearable, and they threw radishes at him. By now the movie had turned into a melodramatic litany of failure, the script was a pointless grind, and Romulus wished it were Christmas again so he could watch
It’s a Wonderful Life.

He prayed for an ad.

But this movie was presented as a public service by the Stuyvesant Fund for Absolute Control, and there were no ads.

I
nstead he got more of Steve McQueen’s screaming rages, and one job after another, and mental hospitals and halfway houses, and one by one his other brothers coming around and trying to rescue him, but nothing doing, and more mental hospitals and halfway houses, and Ali MacGraw raising their little girl by herself, with her job at the welfare office.

And then the scene where he didn’t come home one night until about noon, and she said, “Where have you been?” And he said, “I’m a free man, right? I spent the night in a cave in Inwood Park.” And she said, “Then spend another night there. I can’t do this no more. I love you, but I got a kid to raise and I got to get on with it.”

So she threw him out.

And Steve McQueen was on his way back to Manhattan, crossing the Willis Avenue Bridge, when a big limo pulled up. The door opened, he got in. They went to Stuyvesant’s tower. There was a Jacuzzi in the elevator, and Steve McQueen sat beside it on this lovely sofa, and then the elevator door opened and there was Stuyvesant—and a grand piano.

“Come in. Come in, sit down, and play, my son.”

Steve McQueen played three selections from
The Sound of
Music
—played them heartfeltly. When he was done he wept, and he told Stuyvesant, “I’ve learned my lesson.”

Y-rays flashed and crackled everywhere, like Tinkerbell. Stuyvesant gave him the Congressional Medal of Honor and said, “See how sweet reality can be once you accept it as your personal savior?”

Then Ali MacGraw and the kids came running in for a big embrace. Music up and out.

Romulus threw the remote control at the screen, but the screen had been made from the fingernails of South African miners, and wouldn’t break. Sirens sang down on Dyckman Street, and on the Henry Hudson Parkway. Stuyvesant’s minions making their rounds. And then when the sirens faded there was nothing for a while but the sound of the drizzle, and of the snow thawing and dripping in front of the cave, and Romulus managed a few rags of sleep.

H
e spent a great part of the next day at the Inwood Branch Library.

He was trying to fathom the hidden meanings in
The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature,
but it was too damn hot in here to concentrate.

He took off his topmost coat and hung it on the back of his chair—this insulting school cafeteria plastic scoop-chair. Then ten minutes later he took off another coat.

But the lining didn’t come off with it, so he had to take
that
off, too, and nothing but battle-flag shreds it was—and all the while that old librarian was giving him this dark eye as though it were
her
battle.

And then ten minutes later he had to take off the last coat.

Peeling away—stripping down to a proto-Romulus he hadn’t seen in weeks, and releasing, as he did, ranker and ranker fumes of himself. He was disgusted. What was the matter with him, not bothering to wash? Falling apart at the seams here. The librarian scowled at him. A tableful of junior-high nasties kept bursting out in snorts of derisive laughter. He was having trouble staying awake, and he needed to take a leak. Meanwhile,
The Reader’s Guide
utterly resisted him. He rubbed his head, picked at his beard. He found morsels of the week-old croissant he’d had for breakfast. Picked them off and popped them in his mouth. The junior-high nasties turned blue trying not to laugh and then exploded. He got up and wobbled to the librarian.

She had set up her face to hurt you. Romulus showed her
The Reader’s Guide.

“I can’t use this. It’s in Chinese.”

“Were you sleeping before, sir?”

“I had my eyes shut. I mean, it’s like an oven in here. What, are you baking us? You making a pie?”

“You can’t sleep in here.”

“You got one of these books in English?”

“What are you looking for?”

“I’m looking for articles about a certain murderer.”

“Did you look under ‘Murder’?”

“Yeah, but nothing about Leppenraub.”

“Leppenraub. You mean David Leppenraub? He’s a photographer.”

“You mean photographer-murderers are kept separate from regular murderers?”

She opened the book, flipped briskly to the
L
s.

She said, “See there’s plenty of articles about Leppenraub. We don’t have most of these magazines though. We do have
Artforum.
All right, here’s one. September of 1992. You’ll find the
Artforums
up on that shelf.”

He asked her, “Where’s your furnace?”

“What?”

“Don’t get all excited, I just want to check out your furnace. It’s so goddamn hot. I want to see what you’re burning in there.”

“This is a library.”

“You won’t show me. Right. You don’t
need
to show me, either, ’cause now I
know.
”

He went and pulled down the bound copies of
Artforum.
Brought them back to his table. All the chairs in this place were the same color, an electric, executioner’s green. They hung on, in blobs, in the corner of your eye when you were trying to read, and drove you nuts. That and the heat. He took off his heavy shirt, so he was down to his Batman T-shirt. Fads always swing around again sooner or later, he thought—if I just keep wearing this shirt for another twenty years, it ought to be worth something.

He got up and went back to the librarian’s desk.

“I need to take a leak.”

“Excuse me?”

“A whiz.”

“This isn’t a shelter.”

“The key, OK?”

“You people think it’s your own private bathroom. You make a mess and expect us to clean it.”

“Not me. My aim is outstanding. You want to come watch? I’m a sharpshooter.”

She handed over the key.

In the bathroom there was a chain through the toilet paper and a padlock on the chain. Romulus’s aim was as fuzzy as ever. Oh, concede her these droplets all around the bowl, these little yellow vindications, it will satisfy her no end to find them here.

While shaking, he felt Y-rays, curdling around his legs. He looked down. There was some kind of ivory-white rubber-tipped device attached to the wall by the sink. He dealt it a smart kick. Which did the device no apparent harm, but the Y-rays seemed to subside. Or else with the pain in his toes he couldn’t feel them.

He limped back to his seat. Found the September 1992 issue of
Artforum
and leafed through it, and soon he came upon an article entitled