The Fuck Up (16 page)

The longer Glenn held the phone and listened to his apology, the better his chances were. This clown made me feel bad for not fighting harder to keep Sarah. I should’ve let Sarah draw some blood. That would’ve evened the score. I figured that in another minute, Glenn would be cursing him and
then tearing some of his clothes, but then he’d be on his way over, both in tears and renewing vows of their rediscovered love. I didn’t care to witness any of it, so I tugged on my shoes, and tucked in my shirt. But then, without so much as a change in expression, Glenn hung up the phone.

“What’s up?” I asked for the verdict.

“It’s over.”

“What did he say?”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing he can say can change any of it. He fucked everyone in that office that could type over ten words per minute.”

I sensed that she didn’t care to reexplore the event. Although she was in her mid-thirties, that morning, as the sun came into the window, after all the tears and sleeplessness, she looked fresh out of puberty. Her current frame of mind probably made the future seem bleak and lonely. She had suffered a slight death. So I got up from where I was sitting and sat down next to her. Gently I put my arm around her and gave her a peck on the cheek. She was icy cold and I held her paternally, but she just calmly pulled away. After a couple of minutes, when oxygen made its way back up to her brain, and when her lost blood had been replaced, she murmured, “What a schmuck.”

I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to me or the guy on the phone until she kissed me. I started softly kissing her face, along the ridge of her collarbone, undoing her blouse buttons, moving down along her breast. All the while I expected her at any moment to properly stop me. I wondered if perhaps I wasn’t taking advantage of her at a vulnerable moment.

When she led me into her bedroom, I could see all the traces of him, the cologne on the bureau, his satin and monogrammed robe, and so on. She slowly massaged, rubbed and tickled over me in the course of the afternoon and early evening.

In the few days since I met her, I thought of her as neither promiscuous
nor giving, but I had lucked out. It was all timing. I had won all the love sired by spite. I made attempts at reciprocating, but it had been so long since I had been on the receiving end that I couldn’t bring myself to put an end to her outpouring.

When I awoke, it was afternoon the next day, I could feel her gently stirring against me, nude to nude. She opened her eyes slowly and then burst open her arms in a yawn. Through the lace curtains the sun softly speckled everything, and from the backyard beyond the windows, I could hear birds chirping. There were no sounds of sirens, pigeons or sidewalk crowds.

“I’m ravenous,” she whispered, and the kissing started again. But just when she started loosening and I began stiffening, she broke off and led me off into her bathroom. It was the size of a studio apartment. A Jacuzzi was sunken into the floor and after it was filled and turned on, we slid in. Water of equatorial temperature whirled around us making creamy bubbles, and we made love again. Slowly towelling me off, she pampered me, first with a lotion and then with a powder. She then led me back into the bedroom. I felt a combination of rebirth and redevirgination. My skin was never silkier. We both began to dress, until she saw what I was wearing. “You can’t wear those clothes.”

Leading me to a deep closet filled with enough men’s clothes to stock a store, she picked out an expensive suit, a new Armani shirt complete with cellophane wrappings, pins and the cardboard necking. She spent the longest time finding the exact tie. Everything was a little loose on me, but it was still pure extravagance. As I put it all on, I was grateful for the guy’s vanity. We locked arms, and Glenn led me to a very classy “supper club” on Montague Street. It was too late for lunch so we had an early dinner; French cuisine with an excellent wine that the maître d’ suggested. This was a whole new league for me.

The waiter, some young Pierre, brought over two silver platters with covers. When he opened the platters, the food was still sizzling. One plate was fish and the other was meat; both were nestled in unusual vegetables and sautéed in a terrific wine sauce. After two days of fucking and fasting, I was starving. Grabbing my utensils with both hands, I forked that food into my mouth faster than any farm boy ever flung hay. Soon Glenn was casting glances, and I could sense that she was resisting an urge to correct my slobbishness. I only ate with one hand and took a slurp of wine after every mouthful of food to pace myself. The gourmet banquet, the elegant abode, the discerning wardrobe, the panache of it all was making me giddy. For a sober instant I was paranoid: was she expecting me to treat her? I took a gulp of wine, and started wolfing down the food nervously again. I wanted to ask her who was picking up the tab, but I knew that she would regard it a vulgar question. She had to pay; my condition was obvious.

“Really, you should masticate your food,” she commented.

“How are you going to pay for this?” I asked just to get the insecurity out of the way.

“With money,” she replied. “I write dinners off as business expenses, why?”

I continued eating at her pace, and felt somewhat insecure by the security and control she had about everything. Her remark about the meal being a “business expense” had put everything in its proper framework: the last two days were nothing more than business. After dinner, the Pierre brought over a dessert tray. I picked out the most intricate structure of chocolate ever constructed. With it we had two reviving demitasses. Because she was a little low on paper, she paid the bill with plastic. We left the restaurant and walked down Montague Street toward the river. There, we strolled the promenade, which decked around Brooklyn Heights giving a humongous view of
Manhattan on its Nile. It was late afternoon, and although the sun was sinking early, it was the warmest day in the past week of frost. There was something autumnal about the day—the tiny, bony branches should have been gently swaying with yellowing leaves. When we finally made it up the stately steps of her brownstone, she said her first words since we left the restaurant: “I don’t know how I could’ve passed through this alone.”

Once we entered her living room we took off our coats. While I examined my borrowed clothes in a full-length mirror, she explained that she didn’t want to be callous yet she needed to be alone for a while. If I liked, she said, I could make use of the lower floors. Then she went to a cabinet, where she took out a brass ring of keys. “If you want to go out, these are the house keys. This is the key to the garage downstairs, and this is the key to the Mercedes, if you drive. I don’t.”

“You’re very kind,” I said, grabbing the coat. “There’s no need to feel like you’ve got to pay me, I’ll get going and call you in a day or so.”

“Wait.” She was suddenly distressed. “Where will you be going?”

“I don’t know, why?”

“You can’t go. I’m not just being polite. Would you do me a favor and come back later?”

“What’s the problem?”

“This might sound strange, but I know I’m going to be going through a kind of roller coaster ride, and for a while it’s going to be difficult to handle things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Sometimes…I lose track of life. Things lose their value. I become very messy.” Then she lapsed into an embarrassed silence.

I knew the feeling. I agreed to stick around. She thanked me and retreated upstairs to her bedroom where I could hear her close the large oak
double doors that separated the upper half of the house from the lower half. The house was loaded with modern conveniences. Everything was either reconditioned antique or high tech.

Behind a set of panel doors in the living room, I opened up the RCA Entertainment Center—that was what the label read—that included a widescreened color TV, at least twenty-five inches in length and a VCR. In an old bookshelf that had been built right into the wall and that probably once supported a classics library, VCR tapes were aligned. I picked out two films that never became too popular:
Cutter’s Way
and
Wise Blood.

It was just after five o’clock and while I was trying to get the VCR to work, I lost the sound on the TV Both the VCR and the TV had separate remotes and while trying to make them cooperate, I watched a mechanical woman soundlessly broadcast the news.

Flashing across the TV for only an instant on a screen behind the Newsreadette was an old college yearbook photograph of Helmsley. By the time I cranked up the volume, I heard the Newsreadette say, “…was identified by a relative.”

As I dashed
out of the front door, I figured that I had a thirty-minute run ahead of me. Turning back before the front door swung shut, I raced downstairs to the garage on the ground floor. The Mercedes started right up. I zoomed out and down Court Street zipping through lights and cutting off other cars until I screeched to a stop at Helmsleys front door on President Street. I dashed up his steps and banged on the door. I heard some rustling inside, and then the peephole was filled with an eye, “Can I help you?”

“I’m a friend of Helmsley, please open up.”

The door opened and a decrepit old lady appeared, her face was all droopy and crinkled, “Poor boy, mixing with trash.”

“They killed him?”

“Well, I certainly believe so.”

“How…what happened?”

“A Brody, he done. Right off the bridge. That’s what they say, anyhow.”

“When? Did they find who threw his body off the bridge?”

“I only know it was the Brooklyn Bridge,” she mumbled as she disappeared into Helmsley’s bedroom.

Looking about, I couldn’t believe it. His books were thrown in stacks around the house. I arbitrarily picked up a cloth book yanked from its spine;
Das Kapital,
one of the earliest editions, in a three-volume set; it had been invaluable. I let it drop back to the floor. I remember him showing me one book that was singed brown. It was printed in Cyrillic. He explained that it had survived the 1812 torching of Moscow. So many of his books that had survived brutal tests of ages and centuries had finally met their end here. When I finally composed myself, I asked, “Did the police see this? Do they know who killed him?”

“Police?” squawked the old lady.

“’Course,” I replied. “They should see this.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “That’s plain crazy talk.”

“What do you mean crazy talk?” And then pointing to the floor I screamed, “Look at what those fucking wops did!”

“Wops!” she replied. “Who are you calling wops? His family’s Polish.”

“What?”

She explained that when the gang of relatives heard of Helmsley’s demise, they came quickly to life. They descended upon his meager belongings. Their beaks tore into his body. As this pinhead standing before me, an old
and straggling member of the herd, described the occurrence, I fought an urge to bang her over the head with a shovel. I walked from room to room, staring at the floor.

Greed has no patience, and there are no claims from beyond the grave. Apparently the landlord was eager to repossess Helmsley’s rent-controlled hovel and had generously given entrance to anybody claiming relations to the deceased.

But I had the last laugh, these mindless insects were more attuned to consumption than taste; they thoughtlessly loaded up their shopping bags with shiny trinkets and tinsels. To them books were things to prop up air conditioners and hold open doors. They didn’t know that the closest thing that Brooklyn could ever compare to a privately owned library of Alexandria was what they had been walking on. I discovered that when the many kin and cousins first rampaged earlier that day, a frenzy had occurred. The books had been shoddily cast into small miscellaneous heaps; the jackals had stripped the books from the shelves checking for any penny-ante treasure that might be stashed behind them. They didn’t know that when Helmsley wanted to read a book, he would go to the library because the books he owned were treasures.

“Has anybody taken any of the books?” I asked the old lady.

“Naw,” she replied, fishing through old pots and pans. “Super said his son’s throwing them out tonight.”

“May I take some?”

“Whatever,” she replied.

For a moment my heart, my arms, everything opened and unfolded and rapture engulfed all; these books are mine! But as soon as I dashed into his bedroom—only then did it hit me. Helmsley: My mentor, that athlete of the mind whose passion was rivalled only by his logic, a minor twentieth century
New York philosopher who had unfailingly caught me whenever I dropped from my tightrope. He was dead.

I didn’t have energy in me commensurate to the loss. I sat on his bed and carefully labored to conjure, summon, recollect, and synthesize all the nuances toward the identity of Helmsley Micinski; to address his distinctions, and why in a world of five billion he was indispensable, and how mankind somehow would never solidly complete its final purpose—whatever that might be—because of his robbed life. But most of all, I tried appraising how much of me was Helmsley: how much of my own thought syntax and spiritual matrix was traceable to him, was him? All of this stewed in that greasy pot of agony.

When I escaped to the city trying to shake free the stalking grief and heartache of my father’s death, I learned that loss was life. Tears were inexperience. The shock was gradually absorbed, all emotional bodies eventually regained their proper orbit. The closest thing to relief was when I eventually perceived my father had always been dead. But now there was Helmsley and once again life was for mourning.

Once, as a teenager, I had believed that people could change themselves. Finally I realized that all one could ever hope was understanding one’s filthy self better. I felt cleaner by realizing that more than anything in the world, I desired Helmsley’s books. And far more than missing my friend, I felt sorry that I had lost my insurance of continued existence. Also, I had been closer to him than to any of these strangers. With all this in mind, I started making piles of books, first selecting the most valuable, such as a Shakespeare & Company signed edition of
Ulysses
that was still in mint condition. I wrapped most of his precious books in his old clothes and stacked them on the bed. I had nowhere near Helmsley’s vast data bank of knowledge, and I sensed that I was ignorantly discarding volumes of priceless books, but I had
neither the time nor the space. The super’s son would execute his duty in a short couple of hours; I could only save as many as would fit in the car.