The Christmas Kid (13 page)

WHETHER HE WAS AWAKE
or asleep, the New York craziness never left Hirsch alone. Sometimes he tried to tell his wife, Margaret, about his dreams—the dark roaring tunnels, the gleaming yellow eyes of the leopard perched in the backyard tree, the baby with the metal tongue who never stopped screaming. She would always cut him off. “Hirsch,” she would say. “Calm down. You’re letting it get to you, Hirsch. You’re sounding paranoid, Hirsch.”

“Yes,” Hirsch would say. “But I do have enemies.”

Waking, a mask of calm pasted to his face, Hirsch would leave for the advertising agency promptly each morning at nine. He no longer took the subway from Brooklyn Heights. Junkies waited in the doorways near the station, he thought, and the subway was itself a brutal morning assault, an iron purgatory jammed with knife artists, hammer swingers, lobotomized crazies. They, too, inhabited his dreams, spraying paint down his throat, ramming switchblades into his heart, slicing him with smiles on their faces. Them. He was afraid of Them. Blacks and whites, people speaking mysterious languages, young men with eyes full of ancient evil:
Them
. Now Hirsch drove a car. A dark blue Oldsmobile. In a car, he wouldn’t have to deal with Them.

Except that on this rainy Brooklyn morning, the car was gone.

“They’ve stolen the car,” he said, coming back up the stoop of the brownstone, his eyes wild: “They took the car!”

Margaret calmed Hirsch and called the police. Then she arranged for a car service to pick him up and take him across the bridge to work. Hirsch waited inside the vestibule for the car, seeing killers and marauders walking down his street. They don’t work, he thought; they patrol. They come around like rats, seeking weakness and vulnerability, and then they strike. I should have a gun. I should be able to shoot all of them.

There were two policemen in the reception room of the advertising agency when Hirsch arrived with his coffee and danish. Someone had broken into the office during the night and stolen two IBM Selectrics. The cops looked weary as they made notes in spiral pads.

“They wrecked the Xerox machine, too,” said Ruthie, the receptionist. “Just poured rubber cement into it and ruined it. Can you imagine?”

“Yes,” Hirsch said. “I can imagine.”

Hirsch went into his office and sat at his desk. One of his desk drawers was open. Suddenly, Hirsch was afraid, as if one of the intruders might still be watching, examining his courage from a distance. They had been here, a gang of Them, invaders from the darkness, and they had rummaged through this small part of the world that was his. Hirsch hurried out to tell the cops. They were gone.

“You mean they didn’t take fingerprints or anything?” Hirsch asked. Ruthie laughed. “Come on, Mr. Hirsch. They don’t do stuff like that anymore.” She powdered her nose. “They just fill out the forms for the insurance company.”

That was typical. The craziness was now general. Thievery, robbery, violence; knives, guns, blood, and pain. They were as natural now as breathing. He examined his desk. Nothing had been taken except a cheap old onyx-handled letter opener his wife had bought for him during their honeymoon in Acapulco in 1958. Of course. If they could, they would steal only the small things that you loved. Hirsch was very still for a long time, and then worked through the morning in a gray fog, trying to infuse his copy with images of joy and romance. His wife called to say that all the forms had been filled out about the stolen car. Hirsch ate lunch at his desk, then napped on his couch.

Again, he saw the leopard in the garden, its eyes the color of typhoid. The baby with the metal tongue screamed in a higher pitch. He saw gray horses leaping from a pier and a woman in a white dress on the deck of a boat receding into a dark sea. He awoke with chills.

The afternoon was a blur. He went home at four, another car service picking him up at the curb, outside his office. When he got to Brooklyn Heights, he froze.

The blue Oldsmobile was parked across the street from his house.

Hirsch paid the car service and felt his heart twitching. He went over to his car, walking around it as if it were booby-trapped. No dents. No graffiti. But there was an envelope stuck to the steering wheel. Scrawled on the outside were the words: “To the Owner.”

Cautiously, Hirsch unlocked the door and opened the envelope. It contained two theater tickets to
Dreamgirls
and a typed note.

The note was not signed. But Hirsch was suddenly flooded with a feeling of redemption and hope. His car was back! One of Them had explained himself. One of Them even had offered reparations. Hirsch rushed up the stairs to tell his wife, and she laughed, and told him it just proved that New York was not as crazy as Hirsch thought it was, and said that they really should celebrate. The tickets were for that night. They should use them.

“Why not, Hirsch?” Margaret asked. “We can drive the car to Manhattan, so it shouldn’t get stolen again.”

Hirsch immediately agreed. He made a reservation at Frankie & Johnnie’s for after the theater, took a hot bath, dressed in his best suit. He thought his wife looked beautiful. He wished the kids, grown up and moved away, could see her like this. And at 7:15 they went off to the theater. Margaret enjoyed the show more than Hirsch did; he simply didn’t identify with the problems of show-business people. But still, it was a Broadway show, a night in New York.

With an act of will, he ignored the crazies, the autograph nuts, the shopping-bag ladies, the junkies and knifers and walking wounded of Times Square. The lamb chops at the restaurant were delicious. They drove home in near silence, Hirsch saying that such nights were what made him love New York in the years when he and Margaret were young.

“Now, if you find a parking spot, “Margaret said, “it will be a perfect night.”

“Maybe our benefactor, the thief, will hold one for us,” Hirsch said, and they both laughed.

They cruised the streets of Brooklyn Heights for twenty minutes, and finally found a spot. They strolled home hand in hand, and Hirsch went up the stoop with his key out. He opened the door and right away knew that something was wrong. The framed lithograph of the Brooklyn Bridge was gone. He motioned for Margaret to wait, and stepped inside to the right, where the living room was. Everything was gone. Paintings, photographs, chairs, couch, lamps, tables. The kitchen, too, had been emptied. He went back to the staircase and looked upstairs into the darkness, but he didn’t move.

“They took everything,” he whispered, backing up, fear rising in a wide band across his back. “They’ve been here. They’ve got it all.”

And now he wanted to run. Margaret took his arm, her face ashen, as they stared into the violated, plundered house.

“There’s a leopard in the yard.” Hirsch said. “It’s in the tree.” His eyes were wide with horror. “It has yellow eyes.”

Then, in the quiet street, with a slight breeze combing the trees, and a half-moon crossing the city, Hirsch held onto the railing, threw back his head, and began to scream.

DURING THE LONG DECADE
after his mother died, Bondanella lived in a furnished room in Park Slope. The room was cozy and warm, with a small refrigerator and an electric stove, a clothes closet and a large chair. The bed was a bit hard, but Bondanella didn’t mind; he was used to it now, as he had become accustomed to the bathroom in the hall. He had his sink, his TV set, the plastic hamper for his dirty clothes, and didn’t care too much about the small pleasures. He had eliminated passion from his life as if it were a bad habit, and was frequently puzzled when he observed the tumultuous fortunes of the people he saw on TV. They lived dangerous lives, and Bondanella lived in safety.

Part of his sense of safety came from his insistence on routine, the only souvenir of his three years in the United States Navy. Routine pleased him: it eliminated choice, it gave his life structure. And so each day he rose precisely at seven, did precisely ten minutes of exercise, spent precisely five minutes in the shower, and took precisely twelve minutes to dress. He walked six blocks to the Purity Diner, and always ordered scrambled eggs and bacon, rye toast, coffee, and orange juice. The subway sometimes gave him problems, because it refused to follow Bondanella’s own careful schedule. But most mornings he was at his desk in the brokerage house on Broad Street at precisely ten minutes to nine. He took precisely an hour for lunch, and left the office at exactly 5:15.

There were, of course, no women in his life. Somehow all that had passed him by, although Bondanella had no real regrets. He saw marriage as a huge invasion of privacy, a disruption of safety. So in the evenings, Bondanella arrived alone at precisely seven at Snooky’s Pub, ordered the hamburger platter, and was home in bed, watching TV, by nine o’clock. On Saturday nights, he was a cautious adventurer. He went to Chinatown once a month; he tried other neighborhood restaurants; he ventured to downtown movie houses. He was always alone.

Then, one Saturday morning, he saw the tomato.

He was bringing his shirts to the laundry when he saw it, lying with other tomatoes on a stand in front of the Korean fruit and vegetable store. The tomato stood out from the others because it was still brushed with green. An ordinary young tomato. But when Bondanella lifted it, he felt youth, warmth, firmness, and he knew he had to have it. The Korean gave him fifty-one cents change from a dollar and slipped the lone tomato into a bag, and Bondanella went out, heading to the laundry, and was astonished to find himself whistling some old tune, with jumbled words, something about an umbrella. A tune he hadn’t thought about in thirty years. He fought down a sudden urge to forget about the laundry and go directly home. But that urge was frightening; it was a clear threat against routine, and as he dropped off the shirts, Bondanella discovered that his hands were sweating.

“You’re a beautiful tomato,” he said out loud as he closed the door to his room behind him. But it took him a while to open the paper bag, to reach in and lift out the tomato, and then heft it in the palm of his hand. He took it over to the windowsill and placed it directly in the center. The sun was streaming in, emphasizing the highlights on the tomato’s glossy skin. Bondanella trembled.

That evening, he went to see
Return of the Jedi,
sitting alone in the orchestra, baffled by the abrupt shifts in the story, unable to make sense of the dialogue. He went to Lombardi’s on Spring Street after the movie, and casually ordered rigatoni. But when the plate came, and he saw the luxurious sauce, his mind filled with an image of the tomato, home in Brooklyn, alone on the windowsill. He poked at the pasta, but had trouble eating it; the waiter was upset, afraid that the food had displeased a customer.

“It’s not the food,” Bondanella explained. “It’s me. I, er, don’t feel too good.…”

He went home, wondering what his mother would say if she knew that he’d paid for food he hadn’t eaten. Poor Ma. She led a hard life. But as he reached the house in Park Slope and hurried up the stoop, he was feeling better. He whistled the same half-remembered tune about a fella with an umbrella. And then, safe in the furnished room, he approached the tomato. He couldn’t see the color clearly in the artificial light, but he thrilled to its firmness and youth. When he tried to sleep, he tossed about, filled with odd anxieties.…

On Sunday morning, the tomato seemed larger. And redder.

“You…you’re growing!” Bondanella said in an amazed voice. He swallowed hard, reached out, and lifted the tomato from its sunny perch.
She’s growing up,
he thought.
She’s changing.…
The room was very hot now, and Bondanella felt  tiny beads of perspiration on the tomato’s skin.
Do tomatoes sweat? Or is it me?

“You’re the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” he said. He filled a bowl with cold water and placed her in it, the water intensifying her pale greens and deeper reds. The bowl was kind of her room. Then he heard the landlady’s heavy footsteps in the hall, and a sudden sharp knock on the door. He opened the door about a foot and stared at her powdery face, the mole on her chin, her rheumy, colorless eyes.

“Do you have someone in here, Mr. Bondanella?” she asked in her throaty voice. “If you do, I want the room.”

He opened the door wider. “Of course not, Mrs. Reilly. I was just, you know, humming a tune, I guess. Or maybe talking to myself.…”

She glanced past him, her colorless eyes prepared to prosecute at the first sign of sin. “Well, have a nice day, Mr. Bondanella,” she murmured in a disappointed voice, and went out through the hall doors to the stoop. Bondanella’s heart pounded. That night, he took the tomato to bed. He placed her in a small bowl so he wouldn’t roll over and crush her, and he slept solidly, a man content and complete.

Now there was a new element to his routine. In the evenings, he hurried home, picking up food at the deli or the Chinese take-out place. He would gaze at the tomato while he ate, enchanted by her plumpness, her size, her quiet beauty. By Wednesday, the streaks of green were gone; she had survived adolescence. He entered her gently in cool, clear water, drying her with a soft cloth. And she inhabited his dreams. Once, he came home in a dream and the tomato was sitting in a chair, with sewing beside her. In another dream, she wore a veil, mysterious and sensual, peering at him from a corner of the room. And there was a time when she grew to fill the entire room, from wall to wall, keeping Bondanella in and Mrs. Reilly out.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said one night that first week. “You’re so perfect. I wish you could speak.…”

And then he knew that somehow he was sure to lose her. She was, after all, mortal. And knowing that, Bondanella became angry. He cursed fate, the universe, nature, God. He had lived a long solitude, and suddenly, absurdly, the solitude had been broken, and he knew that the union would be only an interlude. And knowing that, Bondanella held the tomato to him and rubbed her smooth skin against his cheek and began to cry.

The next day, he called in sick for the first time in nine years. There was so little time left. He took her to Coney Island, showed her the beach, took her on the Cyclone and the merry-go-round. He whispered to her in the wax museum. He explained to her about the clam sandwiches at Nathan’s. They went home for a nap, and that night he took her to Yankee Stadium, trying to make clear to her the elegance of the game. The next day it was the Statue of Liberty, and Washington Square Park and the Empire State Building. She was very brave, and Bondanella had never been more charming, more full of life.

When she began to fade, he put her back in the bowl and laced the cool water with vitamins and herbs. He talked about winter trips to the country, about getting tickets in the spring for
La Cage aux Folles
. But nothing reversed; youth was gone; she shriveled into inevitable old age. Bondanella found himself talking to her without actually looking at her. He wanted to remember her the way she was.

He buried her on a starry Saturday night in Prospect Park. He found a thicket on the hill beside the Quaker cemetery, dug quickly and furtively with a soup spoon, and laid her gently in the dark, moist earth. He made a triad of smooth stones to mark the spot, and then said a short prayer. It was over. At the end, he looked up at the sky, at the infinity of stars, let out one aching cry of loneliness and loss, and then walked in silence down the hill and back into the safe routine of his life.