Authors: Bernard Malamud
The Tenants (9 page)
It was a warmish cold day of snow melting, and he drifted aimlessly uptown, pretending not to be thinking of his work, whereas in desperate truth he was scribbling away in the head—it came to not much. Though the writer was not crippled he walked with a limp. He saw with a limp, nothing quite meets his gloomy gaze or fastens there. He is missing something —that begins in an end. He thinks of settlement, compromise, a less than perfect conclusion—how many will know the difference? But when he sneaks around his malaise and sees himself once more at his desk, writing, he can’t imagine he will settle for less than
a sufficient ending, the one that must be if the book is to be as good as it must. Anyway, Lesser, after a dozen blocks, admits that whatever presently afflicts him is not an incurable disease. A man is entitled to be momentarily fed up. All he has to do to scare the puking bird off his skull, dispel the despondency that keeps him from working, is go back to his desk and sit down with his pen in his hand; asking not what the writing will or won’t give him. So it’s not the whole of life but who holds the whole of life in his two hands? Art is an essence, not of everything. Tomorrow is a new day; finish the book and the day after comes bearing gifts. If he began once more to work, settled, calm,
at it,
the mysterious ending, whatever it was or might be, would come of itself as he worked. My God, here it is on paper. He could not conceive how else it would come. No angel flies into his room with a scroll revealing the mystery baked into a loaf of bread, or hidden in a mezuzah. One day he would write a word, then another, and the next is the end.
a sufficient ending, the one that must be if the book is to be as good as it must. Anyway, Lesser, after a dozen blocks, admits that whatever presently afflicts him is not an incurable disease. A man is entitled to be momentarily fed up. All he has to do to scare the puking bird off his skull, dispel the despondency that keeps him from working, is go back to his desk and sit down with his pen in his hand; asking not what the writing will or won’t give him. So it’s not the whole of life but who holds the whole of life in his two hands? Art is an essence, not of everything. Tomorrow is a new day; finish the book and the day after comes bearing gifts. If he began once more to work, settled, calm,
at it,
the mysterious ending, whatever it was or might be, would come of itself as he worked. My God, here it is on paper. He could not conceive how else it would come. No angel flies into his room with a scroll revealing the mystery baked into a loaf of bread, or hidden in a mezuzah. One day he would write a word, then another, and the next is the end.
But the longer Lesser walked the winter streets, the less he felt like returning home and at last gave up the struggle and decided to take a holiday. Big laugh if holiday comes by default. You couldn’t do—for whatever confused reason—what you wanted most to do, ought this minute to be doing, for in essence the job was almost done—hadn’t he invented every step that led to an
end? Hadn’t he written two or three endings, a combination of endings? You had only to choose the right one and put it down once and for all; perhaps it needed one final insight. Then you could, after the book was
there
, reconsider your life and decide how much of the future you wanted to invest in writing—something less than past investment of time and toil. He was tired of loneliness, had thoughts of marriage, a home. There was the rest of one’s life to live, uncertain but possible, if you got to it. Harry promised himself to take at least a year off after finishing this book before beginning another. And the next would go three years in the writing, not seven, not longer. Ah, well, that’s the future, what do you do with a holiday? Since it has been months that he had stepped into a gallery and prowled amid pictures, Lesser, on Fifty-third Street, walked west to the Museum of Modern Art, and after wandering through the permanent collection not really looking—he found it hard to be attentive—stopped in the last room, before his former friend’s abstract and fragmented “Woman.”
end? Hadn’t he written two or three endings, a combination of endings? You had only to choose the right one and put it down once and for all; perhaps it needed one final insight. Then you could, after the book was
there
, reconsider your life and decide how much of the future you wanted to invest in writing—something less than past investment of time and toil. He was tired of loneliness, had thoughts of marriage, a home. There was the rest of one’s life to live, uncertain but possible, if you got to it. Harry promised himself to take at least a year off after finishing this book before beginning another. And the next would go three years in the writing, not seven, not longer. Ah, well, that’s the future, what do you do with a holiday? Since it has been months that he had stepped into a gallery and prowled amid pictures, Lesser, on Fifty-third Street, walked west to the Museum of Modern Art, and after wandering through the permanent collection not really looking—he found it hard to be attentive—stopped in the last room, before his former friend’s abstract and fragmented “Woman.”
Lazar Kohn, an inscrutable type, had been a friend of Lesser’s for a short time in their early twenties. He had become successful too soon for the continuance of their friendship—while the future writer was hating himself for not having yet begun. After a while Kohn stopped seeing him; Lesser, he said, spoiled his pleasure
in his triumph. When Lesser’s first novel appeared, Kohn was abroad; when his second was published, Kohn was dead. His motorcycle had crashed, one rainy night, into a huge moving van on Hudson Street. His work, it was said, had been going badly.
in his triumph. When Lesser’s first novel appeared, Kohn was abroad; when his second was published, Kohn was dead. His motorcycle had crashed, one rainy night, into a huge moving van on Hudson Street. His work, it was said, had been going badly.
There was his green-and-orange picture: a woman trying to complete herself through her own will, as willed by the painter. Otherwise she was an appearance of a face and body trying to make it through a forest of binding brush strokes.
The portrait of the woman—Lesser had once met the model at a party but nothing had come of it—had never been completed. Kohn had worked on it for years and then given up. Lesser had learned this from the model, Kohn’s one-time mistress. Kohn, in defeat, after all his labor, doubt, despair he was not making it, nor ever would, had turned the unfinished canvas to the wall; she had eluded him. You work as you always have but with this picture for no reason you can give or guess, except that it means so much to you to do it as it should be done, you can’t this time make it. She isn’t what I hoped she might be. Whoever she is I don’t know and want no further part of. Let time fuck her, I can’t. But friends who had seen the portrait in Kohn’s studio, in various aspects and colors, said the painter had “made it” despite himself, whether he thought so or no; it was accomplished as art whether or not accomplished as subject, or as originally
conceived. Whatever he put his hand to was Lazar Kohn and Kohn was a distinguished painter. His friends persuaded him to release the picture to his gallery for sale. The museum had bought it and hung it in its permanent collection.
conceived. Whatever he put his hand to was Lazar Kohn and Kohn was a distinguished painter. His friends persuaded him to release the picture to his gallery for sale. The museum had bought it and hung it in its permanent collection.
The picture deepened Lesser’s dejection. Why had it been abandoned? Who knows?—like Lesser, Kohn had had his hangups. Maybe he had wanted to say more than he could at that time, something that wasn’t then in him to say? He might have said it after the motorcycle accident, if he had survived. Or had he been unable to separate the woman from who she really was: she had as self got the better of his art? He could not invent beyond her? She was simply the uncompleted woman of an incomplete man because it was that kind of world, life, art? I can’t give you more than I have given you—make you more than you are—because I haven’t presently got it to give and don’t want anyone to know, least of all myself. Or perhaps it was the painter’s purpose to complete by abandoning, because abandonment or its image was presently a mode of completion? Peace to Valéry. In painting, Lesser thought, you could finish off, total up, whether done or undone, because in the end (the end ?) you hung a canvas object on the wall and there was no sign saying, “Abandoned, come back tomorrow for more.” If it hung it was done, no matter what the painter thought.
Thinking of his own work, regretting that he had never been able to talk with Kohn about it, Lesser reflected that if he could not complete his novel; in the end something essential missing—the ending—some act or appearance or even promise of resolution, hence the form unachieved; then it was no completed work of art, did not deserve to be a book—he would destroy it himself. Nobody would read it except those who already had—besides himself perhaps some bum who had fished a few pages of a prior draft out of the garbage can in front of the house, curious to know what the words said. Lesser then vowed, as he often had, that he would never abandon this novel, never, for whatever reason; nor would anybody good or bad, Levenspiel, Bill Spear, for instance, or any woman, black or white, persuade him to give it up; or call the job done before he had completed it. He had no choice but to bring his book to its inevitable and perfected end.
Who says no?
As Lesser leaves the last gallery, wondering what would happen if he went home and picked up his pen, a blue-hatted black woman in the lobby drops a mirror out of her cloth handbag and it shatters on the floor. A girl in a voluminous silk-lined black cape coming
out of the ladies’ room quickly walks away from it. Lesser, stooping, hands the black woman a large triangular sliver of glass. In it he sees himself, unshaven, gloomy, gaunt; it comes from not writing. The black woman spits on the fragment of mirror Lesser has given her. He backs off. Lesser hurries after the girl in the cape into the street. He had often thought of her, sometimes while writing.
out of the ladies’ room quickly walks away from it. Lesser, stooping, hands the black woman a large triangular sliver of glass. In it he sees himself, unshaven, gloomy, gaunt; it comes from not writing. The black woman spits on the fragment of mirror Lesser has given her. He backs off. Lesser hurries after the girl in the cape into the street. He had often thought of her, sometimes while writing.
“Shalom,” he says in the street.
She looks at him oddly, coldly. “Why do you say that?”
He fumbles, says he isn’t sure. “I never use the word.”
Irene, a moody type, walks in noisy boots along the slushy sidewalk, going towards Sixth Avenue, Lesser walking along with her, surprised to be though he invents surprises of this sort easily enough in his fiction. She moves with a loose-limbed, slightly pigeon-toed stride, wearing a knitted green wool hat from which her hair pours down her back. Her intricate earrings clink faintly. Lesser is thinking of her as she looked at his party——her short thick skirt and pink blouse, her plump white breasts; of looking up her legs to the conjoining thighs. He remembers her dance with Bill he hadn’t been able to break into.
She’s a black man’s girl, they’re a special breed. I’m on my way home.
“How about coffee?” Irene asks.
He says fine.
They sit at a counter. She holds the hot cup with both hands to warm her nail-bitten fingers. Her eyes are evenly green and blue. Her black hair, in daylight, is golden blond.
Lesser, as they drink their coffee, waits as though expecting a confession but she makes none.
He tries to breathe in her perfume but the scent is hidden. Behind the ears? Under her long cape? In her sweaty armpits? Between breasts or legs? He has made the grand tour but hasn’t sniffed flowers. No gardenia, no garden.
“Don’t you have a girl?”
He asks why she asks.
“You had nobody for yourself at your party.”
“The last girl I had was about a year ago. I had one the summer before that. They get impatient waiting for me to finish my book.”
“Willie says it’s taking forever.”
“I’m a slow writer. It’s my nature.”
She smiles sourly.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lesser says.
They walk up Sixth to the park, dirty with melting snow, the pale dead grass on hard ground visible in dark circles under trees. They stand by the low stone wall on Fifty-ninth, overlooking the snowy meadow. The park is of diminished reality to Lesser, tight,
small, remote. The book he is writing is unbearably real in his thoughts. What am I doing so far away from it? What am I doing here on a working day in the middle of winter?
small, remote. The book he is writing is unbearably real in his thoughts. What am I doing so far away from it? What am I doing here on a working day in the middle of winter?
“When do you laugh?” she says. “You’re so deadly serious. It’s your fucking book.”
“I laugh when I write,” Lesser says. “I haven’t written a word today. I ought to be writing now.”
“Why aren’t you?”
Lesser sees himself leaving her at the wall. He crosses Fifth and heads for Third. Halfway to Madison he stops, experiencing a sense of loss. What a fool I am, he thinks. He walks back to where he has left Irene. He thinks she won’t be there but she is. She’s standing at the wall in a long cape, like a bird about to fly off.
“Why is it taking so long?”
He says he doesn’t want to talk about it.
“Is it still that book about love?”
“That’s the book,” he says.
“I read your first novel. Willie got it out of the library and gave it to me after he finished it. It’s very good, better than I thought it would be. The girl reminds me of myself when I was her age. I don’t like her. Did you have anyone real in mind?”
Lesser says no.
They sit on a bench.
“You’re all such self-conscious characters,” Irene says. “When Willie’s hung up on his writing he’s awful to live with. He fights all the minutes of the day. It’s hard to take.”
Again the small smile as she inspects her pigeon toes.
“It was bad enough for him but you’ve made it worse. He was awfully hurt by your criticism of his book.”
“I didn’t want to hurt him.”
“He said you didn’t think much of it.”
“I like the stories better than the Life. They’re a lot more original.”
“It isn’t just autobiography. Willie came from Georgia to Harlem with his mother and kid sister when he was sixteen.”
“I thought it was Mississippi.”
“He changes his birthplace every time he talks about it. I think he hates to remember it.”
“There’s a lot he hates to remember. Did he serve a stretch in prison?”
“Two years. But a lot of the book is made up. Willie’s an imaginative guy. He enjoys being imaginative. You should hear him when he gets talking about himself. That’s the tone I’d like to see in his book. Do you like what he’s writing now?”
“So far,” says Lesser.
“Do you think he is a good writer—I mean will he be?”
“He is though not consistently. If he stays with it seriously he ought to be good.”
“How seriously? Like you have to break your balls to be a writer?”
“There’s no halfass way to be a good writer.”
“There’s nothing halfass about Willie.”
Lesser asks her how she and Willie stand as of now.
She strikes a match, then finds she has no cigarette.
“What do you mean?”
“You seem to be together but you seem to be apart.”
“That’s a good description of us.”
“It’s none of my business,” Lesser says.
“If you say that it means you think it is.”
He says he wishes it were.
“I’m not objecting to your question. I’m wondering how to answer it.”
“Don’t if you don’t want to.”
“Willie and I met about three years ago—that was about a year and a half after I’d quit college to try being an actress. Not that I was that much of one but the idea of it had become an obsession. My God, what a batty girl I was, and I weighed a good twenty-five more pounds than I do now. I’m not bad in my performances but I can’t go down low enough
when I have to, or up as high as I would like to. What I’m saying is I wanted to act mainly so that I could skip being myself. A lot of this came out in my analysis. I wasn’t very self-knowing.”
when I have to, or up as high as I would like to. What I’m saying is I wanted to act mainly so that I could skip being myself. A lot of this came out in my analysis. I wasn’t very self-knowing.”
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