Death Is a Lonely Business (9 page)

Eugene O'Neill was there. Oscar Wilde, but only his sad prison essay, none of his lilac fluff or gentian laughs. Genghis Khan and Mussolini leaned on each other. Books with titles like
Suicide As an Answer
or
The Dark Night of Hamlet
or
Lemmings to the Sea
were on the high shelf in snows. On the floor lay
World War Two
and
Krakatoa, the Explosion Heard Round the World,
along with
India the Hungry
and
The Red Sun Rises.

If you run your eye and mind along books like that, and run your stare along again, disbelieving, there is only one thing you can do. Like a bad film version of
Mourning Becomes Electra,
where one suicide follows another and murder tops murder, and incest incites incest, and blackmail supersedes poisoned apples and people fall down stairs or step on strychnine tacks, you finally snort, toss back your head, and . . .

Laugh!

"What's so funny?" said someone behind me.

I turned.

"I said, what's
so funny?"

He stood with his thin pale face about six inches from the tip of my nose.

The man who slept on that analysis couch.

The man who owned all those end-of-the-world books.

A. L. SHRANK.

"Well?" he said.

"Your library!" I stammered.

A. L. Shrank glared, waiting.

Luckily I sneezed, which erased my laugh and let me cover my confusion with a Kleenex.

"Forgive me, forgive," I said. "I own exactly fourteen books. It's not often you see the New York Public Library imported to Venice pier."

The flames went out in A. L. Shrank's tiny, bright-yellow fox eyes. His wire-thin shoulders sank. His tiny fists opened up. My praise caused him to glance through his own window like a stranger and gape.

"Why," he murmured, amazed, "yes, they're all mine."

I stood looking down at a man no taller than five-one or five-two, maybe less without his shoes. I had a terrible urge to check to see if he wore three-inch heels, but kept my eyes level with the top of his head. He was not even aware of my inspection, so proud was he of the proliferation of literary beasts that infested his dark shelves.

"I have five thousand nine hundred and ten books," he announced.

"You sure it's not five thousand nine hundred and
eleven?"

He very carefully looked only in at his library and said, in a cold voice, "Why are you laughing?"

"The titles...”

"The titles?" He leaned closer to the window to search the shelves for some bright traitor among all those assassin books.

"Well," I said, lamely, "aren't there any summers, good weather, fair winds, in your library? Don't you own any glad books, happy finds like Leacock's
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town? The Sun Is My Undoing? In the Good Old Summertime? June Laughter?"

"No!" Shrank stood on tiptoe to say this, then caught himself and sank down. "No...”

"How about Peacock's
Headlong Hall,
or
Huck Finn, Three Men in a Boat, How Green Was My Father? Pickwick Papers?
Robert Benchley? James Thurber? S. J. Perelman...”

I machine-gunned the titles. Shrank listened and almost cringed back at my recitation of joy. He let me run down.

"How about the
Savonarola Joke Book
or
The Funny Sayings of Jack the Ripper…
" I stopped.

A. L. Shrank was all shadow and ice, turning away.

"Sorry," I said, and I was. "What I'd really like to do some day is come by to browse. That is, if you'll let me."

A. L. Shrank weighed this, decided I was repentant, and moved to touch his shop-front door. It whined softly open. He turned to examine me with his tiny, bright amber eyes, his thin fingers twitching at his sides.

"Why not now?" he said.

"I can't. Later, Mr. …"

"Shrank. A. L. Shrank. Consulting psychologist. No, not Shrink, as you might be thinking, as in psychiatrist. Just plain Shrank, meadow doctor to lost creatures."

He was imitating my banter. His thin smile was a weak-tea duplicate of my own. I felt it would vanish if I, in turn, shut my mouth. I glanced above him.

"How come you've left that old tarot card sign in place? And what about phrenology and hypnotism...”

"You forgot to mention my handwriting analysis sign. And the one mentioning numerology is just inside the door. Be my guest."

I moved, but stopped.

"Come along," said A. L. Shrank. "Come on," he said, really smiling now, the smile of a fish, however, not of a dog. "Step in."

At each gentle command, I inched forward, my eyes touching with all too obvious irony on the hypnotism sign above the tiny man's head. His eyes did not blink.

"Come," said A. L. Shrank, nodding at his library without looking at it.

I found the invitation irresistible, in spite of the car crashes, dirigible burnings, mine explosions, and mental delapidations I knew each book contained.

"Well," I said.

At which moment the entire pier shook. Far out at the end, in the fog, a great creature had struck the pier. It was like a whale brunting a ship, or the
Queen Mary
plowing into the ancient pilings. The big iron brutes out there, hidden, were beginning to tear the planks apart.

The vibrations knocked the planks and came up through my body and Shrank's body, with jolts of mortality and doom. Our bones shook in our blood. We both jerked our heads to try to stare through the fog at the devastation somewhere beyond. The mighty blows jarred me a modicum away from the door. The titanic buffeting trembled and shivered and inched A. L. Shrank on his sill like a lost toy. A paleness bloomed within the paleness of his face. He looked like a man panicked by an earthquake or a tidal wave rushing at the pier. Again and again the great machines hammered and pounded in the fog a hundred yards away, and invisible cracks seemed to appear in A. L. Shrank's milk-glass brow and cheeks. The war had begun! Soon the dark tanks would lumber along the pier, destroying as they came, a flood of carnival émigrés running before them toward land, A. L. Shrank soon to be among them as his house of dark tarot cards fell.

It was my chance to escape, but I failed.

Shrank's gaze had returned to me, as if I could save him from that invasion just beyond. In a moment he might seize my elbow for support.

The pier shook. I shut my eyes.

I thought I heard my secret office telephone ring. I almost cried out, my phone! it's for me!

But I was saved from that by a tide of men and women, and a few children, hurrying the other way, not toward land but rushing toward the sea end of the pier, a large man in a dark cloak and a floppy G. K. Chesterton hat leading the way.

"Last ride, last day, last time!" he yelled. "Last chance! Come on!"

"Shapeshade," whispered A. L. Shrank.

And that's who it was. Shapeshade, the sole owner and proprietor of the old Venice Cinema at the foot of the pier, which would be ground underfoot and turned to celluloid mulch within the week,

"This
way!" called Shapeshade's voice from the mist.

I glanced at A. L. Shrank.

He shrugged and nodded, giving permission.

I ran off into the fog.

The long chattering clack and grind, the ascending slow clang, rattle, and roar, like some robot centipede of immense size scaling the side of a nightmare, pausing at the top for the merest breath, then cascading in a serpentine of squeal, rush, and thunderous roar, in scream, in human shriek down the abysmal span, there to attack, more swiftly this time, another hill, another ascending scale rising yet higher and higher to fall off into hysteria.

The rollercoaster.

I stood looking up at it through the mist.

In an hour, so they said, it would be dead.

It had been part of my life as long as I could remember. From here most nights you could hear people laughing and screaming as they soared up to the heights of so-called existence and plunged down toward an imaginary doom.

So this was to be a final ride late in the afternoon, just before the dynamite experts taped explosives to the dinosaur's legs and brought him to his knees.

"Jump in!" a boy yelled. "It's free!"

"Even free I never thought it was anything but torture," I said.

"Hey, look who's here in the front seat," someone called. "And behind!"

Mr. Shapeshade was there, cramming his vast black hat down over his ears, laughing. Back of him was Annie Oakley the rifle lady.

Back of her sat the man who had run the fun house; alongside him was the old lady who spun the pink cotton candy machine and sold illusion that melted in your mouth and left you hungry long before Chinese food.

Back of them were the Knock a Milk Bottle and the Toss a Hoop team, everyone looking like they were posing for a passport photo to eternity.

Only Mr. Shapeshade, as coxswain, was jubilant.

"As Captain Ahab said, don't be yellow!" he called.

That made me feel like a sheep.

I let the rollercoaster ticket-tearer help me into the coward's back row.

"This your first trip?" He laughed.

"And my last."

"Everyone set to scream?"

"Why not?" cried Shapeshade.

Let me out, I thought. We'll all die!

"Here goes," the ticketman yelled, "nothing!"

It was heaven going up and hell all the way down.

I had this terrible feeling they blew the legs out from under the rollercoaster as we descended.

When we hit bottom I glanced over. A. L. Shrank stood on the pier, staring up at us lunatics who had willingly boarded the
Titanic.
A. L. Shrank backed off in the fog.

But we were climbing again. Everyone screamed. I screamed. Christ, I thought, we sound as if we mean it!

When it was over, the celebrants wandered off in the fog, wiping their eyes, holding on to each other.

Mr. Shapeshade stood beside me as the dynamite men ran in to wrap their explosives around the girders and struts of the great ride.

"You going to stay and watch?" said Mr. Shapeshade, gently.

"I don't think I could stand it," I said. "I saw a film once where they shot an elephant right on screen. The way it fell down and over, collapsed, hurt me terribly. It was like watching someone bomb St. Peter's dome. I wanted to kill the hunters. No, thanks."

A flagman, anyway, was waving us off.

Shapeshade and I walked back through the fog. He took my elbow, like a good middle-European uncle advising his favorite nephew.

"Tonight. No explosions. No destructions. Only joy. Fun. Great old times. My theater. Maybe tonight is our last cinema night. Maybe tomorrow. Free. Gratis. Nice boy,
be
there."

He hugged me and plowed off through the fog like a great dark tugboat.

On my way past A. L. Shrank's I saw that his door was still wide open. But I didn't step in.

I wanted to run, call collect on my gas station telephone, but I feared that two thousand miles of silence would whisper back at me of deaths in sunlit streets, red meats hung in
carneceria
windows, and a loneliness so vast it was like an open wound.

My hair grayed. It grew an inch.

Cal! I thought. Dear, dreadful barber, here I come.

Cal's barber shop in Venice was situated right across the street from the city hall and next door to a bail bond shop where flies hung like dead trapeze artists from flypaper coils that had been left in the windows for ten years, and where men and women from the jail across the way went in like shadows and came out like uninhabited clothes. And next door to that was a little ma-and-pa grocery, but they were gone and their son sat on his pants in the window all day and sold maybe a can of soup and took horse-race telephone bets.

The barber shop, though it had a few flies in the window that had been dead no more than ten days, at least got a wash-down once a month from Cal, who ran the place with well-oiled shears and unoiled elbows and spearmint gossip in his all-pink mouth. He acted like he was running a bee farm and afraid it would get out of hand as he wrestled the big, silver, bumbling insect around your ears until it suddenly froze, bit, and held on to your hair until Cal cursed and yanked back as if he were pulling teeth.

Which is why, along with economics, I had my hair cut only twice a year by Cal.

Twice yearly, also, because of all the barbers in Cal in the world, Cal talked sprayed, gummed, cudgeled, advised, and droned more than most, which boggles the mind. Name a subject he knew it all, top, side, and bottom, and m the middle of explaining dumb Einstein's theory would stop, shut one eye, cock his head and ask the Great Question with No Safe Answer.

"Hev did I ever tell you about me and old Scott Joplin? Why, old Scott and me, by God and by Jesus, listen. That day in 1915 when he taught me how to play the 'Maple Leaf Rag'.
 
Let me tell you."