Two Much! (23 page)

I took the envelope. They watched me with their heavy faces, neither of them saying anything, so I opened the envelope and took out what was obviously an airline ticket. Opening that, I saw my own name, plus those ranks of letters and numbers by means of which airline employees manage to communicate with one another without being overheard by the customer. It took a few seconds to sort out: the “JFK” after “From” would be Kennedy airport, where Bart had soared off for California. And the destination? “To: St. Martin.”

“St. Martin?”

“That's right,” one of them said. “It's an island.”

“In the Caribbean,” the other one said. “You'll love it.”

“Wait a minute, now,” I said. “Miss Kerner sent you here with this?”

They both chuckled, which sounded like the bass fiddle section tuning up. “It don't matter where the ticket come from,” one of them said. “What matters is that you use it.”

“I don't get this.” Maybe I was slow, but I actually didn't get it. Tell me a joke and I'll get it; lean on me and you'll just confuse me.

“You're gonna take a trip,” one of them said. “You're gonna lie around on the sand and enjoy yourself.”

“And every day,” the other one said, “you'll go to the post office at Marigot, on the French side of the island, and you'll ask is there a letter for you.”

“And some day,” the first one said, “there will be a letter. And in it will be a ticket to come back again.”

“And,” the second one said, “you won't come back until you get that letter.”

“Are you two crazy?”

“Not likely, friend.”

“What—what—who's idea is this?” I was trying to think: a joke? Some confusion with Liz? It made no sense to me.

“You don't need to know who it is,” the first one said. “Just think of him as a benefactor.”

“A secret admirer,” the second one said, and they both nodded and smiled at me.

“Volpinex!” I said, and I suddenly saw the whole thing.

Their smiles turned to frowns. The first one said, “Throwing names around, that's not a nice thing to do.”

“He's not getting away with it.” Angry, I tossed the ticket on Gloria's desk and said, “You can give him that, and tell him I'm staying here and getting married.”

“You're a very dumb fella,” the first one told me.

“He needs an explanation,” the second one suggested.

“Maybe so.” The first one frowned—his manner was a bit impatient, a bit pedantic, but mostly disappointed in my denseness—and he said, “See, what our job is, my friend here and me, we send people away. This fella doesn't want that fella around any more, so we send him away.”

“That's right,” the second one said.

“Now, we got two different ways,” the first one said, holding up two meaty fingers, “to send people away. The first is we take a fella to the bus station or the airport or whatever, and put him on board, and wish him like a bon voyage.”

“That's right,” the second one said.

“Now, the second way,” the first one said, “is we take people to the hospital after some bones have been broken. Like leg bones, or maybe a back, maybe a shoulder. All depends how long the fella's supposed to be away.”

“That's right,” the second one said.

I stared at them. They were talking like the heavies in a B movie, they were talking melodrama. Therefore I laughed at them, right? Wrong. I looked at them, and I saw that if they wanted to pretend I was a beachball and toss me back and forth, then that's what they would do, and no way would I stop them. And I noticed that I was alone in this office with these two guys, and I further noticed that they seemed to be very conscientious workmen, dedicated to their job. I backed a step away from them, wondering if I could make it into my inner office, lock the door, phone the police (no, they'd break the door down before I finished dialing), and I said, “Now, look.”

“What our job is this time,” the first one said, going on placidly with his explanation, “is to take you to your apartment and help you pack, and then take you to the airport and put you on the plane.”

“Unless you argue with us,” the second one said.

The first one nodded. “That's right.”

“In that case,” the second one said, “our job is to take you to the hospital.”

Comedy: The Coward's Response to Aggression. Inside I was raging, a death-red glow of fury and hate. I said, “Well, I'll go away with you, but I just know you won't respect me in the morning.”

W
HEN I SAW THE
A
LFA
, I knew I couldn't do it.

Coming interminably down in the freight elevator, my two new friends standing on either side of me like temple columns (“my name, dear, is Simpson, not Samson,”), I had given myself any number of reasons why what was happening to me was not really a defeat after all, but might even be considered in some ways a victory. Art Dodge, driven out of town by Ernest Volpinex, would disappear from the scene. Tomorrow, Bart Dodge would sneak back from St. Martin, have a wonderful reconciliation with Betty, and live happily for the foreseeable future. With any luck, I might even get to keep Liz's ten thousand dollars; if it cleared before she put a stop payment on it. I'd known all along I should stop playing this twin game, should settle into one persona and begin to harvest my crops, so now circumstances were forcing me to take the road I had already acknowledged to be the path of wisdom. And if the taste in my mouth was partly bile, if the lump in my throat was partly rage, if the fact of my exile was mostly Volpinex's victory rather than mine, so what? Bart could get even with him for me later.

That was what I'd talked myself into during the elevator ride. But when we stepped out to the street and I saw that white Alfa Romeo illegally parked by the fire hydrant in front of the building, dealer plates wired on and greenshirted driver from the dealership waiting there to hand me the keys, I knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't lie to myself about victory and defeat, I couldn't con myself into wisdom or acceptance, and I goddamn well couldn't take any airplane to any island in any Caribbean.

The street was its usual workday derangement of activity. The garment district is New York's version of the Baghdad marketplace, with trucks instead of camels, wheeled garment racks instead of burros, and taxis taking the place of the vizier's horsemen. A ferment of tongues is heard, all of them degradations of one or another major language: spic, yid and black predominate, but wop, wog, and various variants of chink are also featured, plus other rarer spices in this or that section of the stew. (What the fellas in the turbans speak I don't know, but it sounds like warm shit being stirred by wooden spoons.)

“This way,” one of my teammates said. “We're parked around the corner.” So the three of us turned right and moved away from the building and the lovely white Alfa (I knew better than to look back at it, though I wanted to) and walked off along the buckled sidewalk into the dishevelment of the garment district.

We walked three abreast, of course, which wasn't easy in that crowd, and several representatives of society's disadvantaged races gave us dirty looks as they stepped off the curb to go around us; three white men taking up the whole damn sidewalk.

Soon we found ourselves moving slowly behind a drove of slow-moving garment racks, propelled by a rabble of spics and spades. The former spoke Cockroach, their version of Spanish, and the latter spoke Harlem, a bastardization of English composed principally of the noun
muhfur
and the adjective
muhfun
.

We were almost to the corner, walking closely behind this shuffling shoal, when I suddenly raised my head and yelled, “You fuckin' niggers move your fuckin' black asses out of the way!”

The number of eyes that turned in my direction was gratifying. Linking my arms with my bewildered comrades, marching forward, I loudly announced, “We're comin' through, jigaboos, so move it!”

The first punch was thrown by a musclebound black whose T-shirt fit him like Saran Wrap, turning his ripply chest and shoulders into a snowbound anatomical study. The punch was thrown at me, but I was no longer there to catch it. The instant I saw that arm rear back I turned and ran.

There was yelling behind me, some of it in actual English. Racing at top speed, skipping sideways between garment racks, hopping over fire hydrants and cardboard cartons, lunging through clusters of dolly-wheeling trolls, sliding along the plate glass windows of the button factory, I didn't look back until I was parallel with the Alfa, and even then I didn't stop. I took it for granted I'd have to leave the neighborhood for a while, and running would be faster than the stop-and-go single lane of taxi-truck-tourist traffic oozing along the middle of the street.

Yes, I would have to depart. Here they came, running along after me, bowling over the pedestrians I'd skirted, creating secondary fist fights and shouting matches in their wake, and even from here I could see the murder in their eyes.

Not my friends of the airline ticket; they were way back where I'd left them, barely discernible in a whirling frenzy of pummeling arms and legs. It was a flying squad of jigaboos, led by my friend in the form-fitting T-shirt, that was pounding after me now, and I really doubted St. Martin was the destination for me they had in mind. Facing forward again, knocking down a pair of fat female Puerto Rican sewing machine operators starting out for an early lunch (spic-ettes? spic-esses?), I bounded over their barrelly bodies and ran for daylight.

A
FTER THE CEREMONY I
kissed the bride and she got into the Lincoln with the best man and left for parts unknown. The other witness, or maid of honor, was the JP's ugly daughter, and so remained in her original setting: picket fence, sagging sofa, black-and-white television set the size of the mouth of the Holland Tunnel.

My escape from the race riot I'd started had been accomplished with the help of a taxi ride up Sixth Avenue. When I'd come back twenty minutes later, police cars were clustered at the end of the block where the fight had begun, and much shouting was taking place back there. The green-shirted auto dealer man, unaltered, continued to lean on the Alfa's fender, one fixed point in a disintegrating age, until I identified myself. With neither small talk nor surprise, he handed me the keys and the provisional registration and an envelope containing instructions on where to meet Liz for the taking-out-the-license ritual in Stamford, and then he faded away while I entered my Alfa.

Life. It
can
be sweet. This creature smelled not like an ordinary new car but like the world's most expensive new glove. Starting the engine (a snarling purr), waiting while a police car full of bloodied blacks went by, I joined the ebb of vehicles, edged my way cautiously through the miserable traffic of midtown to the West Side Highway, then opened it up and just had a wonderful time on the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and the Connecticut Turnpike to Stamford. I got there first and hung around outside in the sunlight until the familiar black Lincoln rolled to a stop by a fortuitous fire hydrant. Liz got out of the back, with somebody she described as “the best man.”

I looked at him. “Are you sure?” This creature was alleged to be a rock musician from Toronto, but appeared to be almost entirely rock, with little left for musician. The only word he knew in English was, “Yuh.” I didn't try him on any other languages, but I doubt he would have shown much proficiency no matter what the tongue.

“Let's go get it over with,” Liz said, and I handed her my three new speeding tickets, saying, “I suppose you have people who can take care of these.”

She glanced at them, put them away in her shoulder bag, and said, “Don't make me a widow before the lawsuit's over, okay?”

“Your concern,” I told her, “inspires me to greater heights of self-protection.”