V. Read online

  A few hours later, they all came reeling down the steps of the old brownstone, horribly drunk. Angel and Geronimo were arguing about whether it was too cold for girls to be in the park. They walked west in the middle of the street. The sky was overcast and dismal. Profane kept bumping into cars. At the corner they invaded a hot dog stand and drank piña colada to sober up. It did no good. They made it to Riverside Drive, where Geronimo collapsed. Profane and Angel picked him up and ran across the street with him held like a battering ram, down a hill and into the park. Profane tripped over a rock and the three of them went flying. They lay on the frozen grass while a bunch of kids in fat wool coats ran back and forth over them, playing pitch and catch with a bright yellow beanbag. Geronimo started to sing.

  “Man,” Angel said, “there is one.” She came walking a mean, nasty-face poodle. Young, with long hair that danced and shimmered against the collar of her coat. Geronimo broke off the song to say “Coño” and wobble his fingers. Then he continued, singing now to her. She didn’t notice any of them, but headed uptown, serene and smiling at the naked trees. Their eyes followed her out of sight. They felt sad.

  Angel sighed. “There are so many,” he said. “So many millions and millions of girls. Here in New York, and up in Boston, where I was once and in thousands more cities. . . . It makes me lose heart.”

  “Out in Jersey too,” said Profane. “I worked in Jersey.”

  “A lot of good stuff in Jersey,” Angel said.

  “Out on the road,” said Profane. “They were all in cars.”

  “Geronimo and I work in the sewers,” Angel said. “Under the street. You don’t see anything down there.”

  “Under the street,” Profane repeated after a minute: “under the Street.”

  Geronimo stopped singing and told Profane how it was. Did he remember the baby alligators? Last year, or maybe the year before, kids all over Nueva York bought these little alligators for pets. Macy’s was selling them for fifty cents, every child, it seemed, had to have one. But soon the children grew bored with them. Some set them loose in the streets, but most flushed them down the toilets. And these had grown and reproduced, had fed off rats and sewage, so that now they moved big, blind, albino, all over the sewer system. Down there, God knew how many there were. Some had turned cannibal because in their neighborhood the rats had all been eaten, or had fled in terror.

  Since the sewer scandal last year, the Department had got conscientious. They called for volunteers to go down with shotguns and get rid of the alligators. Not many had volunteered. Those who had quit soon. Angel and he, Geronimo said proudly, had been there three months longer than anybody.

  Profane, all at once, was sober. “Are they still looking for volunteers,” he said slowly. Angel started to sing. Profane rolled over glaring at Geronimo. “Hey?”

  “Sure,” Geronimo said. “You ever use a shotgun before?”

  Profane said yes. He never had, and never would, not at street level. But a shotgun under the street, under the Street, might be all right. He could kill himself but maybe it would be all right. He could try.

  “I will talk to Mr. Zeitsuss, the boss,” said Geronimo.

  The beanbag hung for a second jolly and bright in the air. “Look, look,” the kids cried: “look at it fall!”

  chapter two

  The Whole Sick

  Crew

  V

  I

  Profane, Angel and Geronimo gave up girl-watching about noon and left the park in search of wine. An hour or so later, Rachel Owlglass, Profane’s Rachel, passed by the spot they’d abandoned, on her way home.

  There is no way to describe the way she walked except as a kind of brave sensual trudging: as if she were nose-deep in snowdrifts, and yet on route to meet a lover. She came up the dead center of the mall, her gray coat fluttering a little in a breeze off the Jersey coast. Her high heels hit precise and neat each time on the Xs of the grating in the middle of the mall. Half a year in this city and at least she had learned to do that. Had lost heels, and once in a while composure, in the process; but now could do it blindfolded. She kept on the grating just to show off. To herself.

  Rachel worked as an interviewer or personnel girl at a downtown employment agency; was at the moment returning from an appointment on the East Side with one Shale Schoenmaker, M.D., a plastic surgeon. Schoenmaker was a craftsman, and came high; had two assistants, one a secretary/receptionist/nurse with an impossibly coy retroussé nose and thousands of freckles, all of which Schoenmaker had done himself. The freckles were tattooed, the girl his mistress; called, by virtue of some associative freak, Irving. The other assistant was a juvenile delinquent named Trench who amused himself between patients by throwing scalpels at a wooden plaque presented to his employer by the United Jewish Appeal. The business was carried on in a fashionable maze or warren of rooms in an apartment building between First and York Avenues, at the fringes of Germantown. In keeping with the location, Brauhaus music blared over a concealed loudspeaker system continuously.

  She had arrived at ten in the morning. Irving told her to wait; she waited. The doctor was busy this morning. The office was crowded, Rachel figured, because it takes four months for a nose job to heal. Four months from now would be June; this meant many pretty Jewish girls who felt they would be perfectly marriageable were it not for an ugly nose could now go husband-hunting at the various resorts all with uniform septa.

  It disgusted Rachel, her theory being that it was not for cosmetic reasons these girls got operated on so much as that the hook nose is traditionally the sign of the Jew and the retroussé nose the sign of the WASP or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the movies and advertisements.

  She sat back, watching the patients come through the outer office, not particularly anxious to see Schoenmaker. One youth with a wispy beard which did nothing to hide a weak chin kept glancing at her embarrassed from moist eyes, across a wide stretch of neutral carpeting. A girl with a gauze beak, eyes closed, lay slumped on a sofa, flanked by her parents, who conferred in whispers about the price.

  Directly across the room from Rachel was a mirror, hung high on the wall, and under the mirror a shelf which held a turn-of-the-century clock. The double face was suspended by four golden flying buttresses above a maze of works, enclosed in clear Swedish lead glass. The pendulum didn’t swing back and forth but was in the form of a disc, parallel to the floor and driven by a shaft which paralleled the hands at six o’clock. The disc turned a quarter-revolution one way, then a quarter-revolution the other, each reversed torsion on the shaft advancing the escapement a notch. Mounted on the disc were two imps or demons, wrought in gold, posed in fantastic attitudes. Their movements were reflected in the mirror along with the window at Rachel’s back, which extended from floor to ceiling and revealed the branches and green needles of a pine tree. The branches whipped back and forth in the February wind, ceaseless and shimmering, and in front of them the two demons performed their metronomic dance, beneath a vertical array of golden gears and ratchet wheels, levers and springs which gleamed warm and gay as any ballroom chandelier.

  Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45 degrees, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart’s ticking (
metronome’s music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp’s dance under the century’s own chandeliers. . . .

  “Miss Owlglass.” Irving, smiling from the entrance to Schoenmaker’s sacristy. Rachel arose, taking her pocketbook, passed the mirror and caught a sidelong glance at her own double in the mirror’s district, passed through the door to confront the doctor, lazy and hostile behind his kidney-shaped desk. He had the bill, and a carbon, lying on the desk. “Miss Harvitz’s account,” Schoenmaker said. Rachel opened her pocketbook, took out a roll of twenties, dropped them on top of the papers.

  “Count them,” she said. “This is the balance.”

  “Later,” the doctor said. “Sit down, Miss Owlglass.”

  “Esther is flat broke,” Rachel said, “and she is going through hell. What you are running here—”

  “—is a vicious racket,” he said dryly. “Cigarette.”

  “I have my own.” She sat on the edge of the chair, pushed away a strand or two of hair hanging over her forehead, searched for a cigarette.

  “Trafficking in human vanity,” Schoenmaker continued, “propagating the fallacy that beauty is not in the soul, that it can be bought. Yes—” his arm shot out with a heavy silver lighter, a thin flame, his voice barked—“it can be bought, Miss Owlglass, I am selling it. I don’t even look on myself as a necessary evil.”

  “You are unnecessary,” she said, through a halo of smoke. Her eyes glittered like the slopes of adjacent sawteeth.

  “You encourage them to sell out,” she said.

  He watched the sensual arch of her own nose. “You’re Orthodox? No. Conservative? Young people never are. My parents were Orthodox. They believe, I believe, that whatever your father is, as long as your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish too because we all come from our mother’s womb. A long unbroken chain of Jewish mothers going all the way back to Eve.”

  She looked “hypocrite” at him.

  “No,” he said, “Eve was the first Jewish mother, the one who set the pattern. The words she said to Adam have been repeated ever since by her daughters: ‘Adam,’ she said, ‘come inside, have a piece fruit.’ ”

  “Ha, ha,” said Rachel.

  “What about this chain, what of inherited characteristics. We’ve come along, become with years more sophisticated, we no longer believe now the earth is flat. Though there’s a man in England, president of a Flat Earth Society, who says it is and is ringed by ice barriers, a frozen world which is where all missing persons go and never return from. So with Lamarck, who said that if you cut the tail off a mother mouse her children will be tailless also. But this is not true, the weight of scientific evidence is against him, just as every photograph from a rocket over White Sands or Cape Canaveral is against the Flat Earth Society. Nothing I do to a Jewish girl’s nose is going to change the noses of her children when she becomes, as she must, a Jewish mother. So how am I being vicious. Am I altering that grand unbroken chain, no. I am not going against nature, I am not selling out any Jews. Individuals do what they want, but the chain goes on and small forces like me will never prevail against it. All that can is something which will change the germ plasm, nuclear radiation, maybe. They will sell out the Jews, maybe give future generations two noses or no nose, who knows, ha, ha. They will sell out the human race.”

  Behind the far door came the thud of Trench’s knife practice. Rachel sat with her legs crossed tightly.

  “Inside,” she said, “what does it do to them there. You alter them there, too. What kind of Jewish mother do they make, they are the kind who make a girl get a nose job even if she doesn’t want one. How many generations have you worked on so far, how many have you played the dear old family doctor for.”

  “You are a nasty girl,” said Schoenmaker, “and so pretty, too. Why yell at me, all I am is one plastic surgeon. Not a psychoanalyst. Maybe someday there will be special plastic surgeons who can do brain jobs too, make some young kid an Einstein, some girl an Eleanor Roosevelt. Or even make people act less nasty. Till then, how do I know what goes on inside. Inside has nothing to do with the chain.”

  “You set up another chain.” She was trying not to yell. “Changing them inside sets up another chain which has nothing to do with germ plasm. You can transmit characteristics outside, too. You can pass along an attitude . . .”

  “Inside, outside,” he said, “you’re being inconsistent, you lose me.”

  “I’d like to,” she said, rising. “I have bad dreams about people like you.”

  “Have your analyst tell you what they mean,” he said.

  “I hope you keep dreaming.” She was at the door, half-turned to him.

  “My bank balance is big enough so I don’t get disillusioned,” he said.

  Being the kind of girl who can’t resist an exit line: “I heard about a disillusioned plastic surgeon,” she said, “who hung himself.” She was gone, stomping out past the mirrored clock, out into the same wind that moved the pine tree, leaving behind the soft chins, warped noses and facial scars of what she feared was a sort of drawing-together or communion.

  Now having left the grating behind she walked over the dead grass of Riverside Park under leafless trees and even more substantial skeletons of apartment houses on the Drive, wondering about Esther Harvitz, her long-time roommate, whom she had helped out of more financial crises than either could remember. An old rusty beer can lay in her path; she kicked it viciously. What is it, she thought, is this the way Nueva York is set up, then, freeloaders and victims? Schoenmaker freeloads off my roommate, she freeloads off me. Is there this long daisy chain of victimizers and victims, screwers and screwees? And if so, who is it I am screwing. She thought first of Slab, Slab of the Raoul-Slab-Melvin triumvirate, between whom and a lack of charity toward all men she’d alternated ever since coming to this city.

  “What do you let her take for,” he had said, “always take.” It was in his studio, she remembered, back during one of those Slab-and-Rachel idylls that usually preceded a Slab-and-Esther Affair. Con Edison had just shut off the electricity so all they had to look at each other by was one gas burner on the stove, which bloomed in a blue and yellow minaret, making the faces masks, their eyes expressionless sheets of light.

  “Baby,” she said, “Slab, it is only that the kid is broke, and if I can afford it why not.”

  “No,” Slab said, a tic dancing high on his cheekbone—or it might only have been the gaslight—“no. Don’t you think I see what this is, she needs you for all the money she keeps soaking you for, and you need her in order to feel like a mother. Every dime she gets out of your pocketbook adds one more strand to this cable that ties you two together like an umbilical cord, making it that much harder to cut, making her survival that much more in danger if the cord ever is cut. How much has she ever paid you back.”

  “She will,” Rachel said.

  “Sure. Now, eight hundred dollars more. To change this.” He waved his arm at a small portrait, leaning against the wall by the garbage can. He reached over, picked it up, tilted it toward the blue flame so they both could see. “Girl at a party.” The picture, perhaps, was meant to be looked at only under hydrocarbon light. It was Esther, leaning against a wall, looking straight out of the picture, at someone approaching her. And there, that look in the eyes—half victim, half in control.

  “Look at it, the nose,” he said. “Why does she want to get that changed. With the nose she is a human being.”

  “Is it only an artist’s concern,” Rachel said. “You object on pictorial, or social grounds. But what else.”

  “Rachel,” he yelled, “she takes home fifty a week, twenty-five comes out for analysis, twelve for rent, leaving thirteen. What for, for high heels she breaks on subway gratings, for lipstick, earrings, clothes. Food, occasionally. So now, eight hundred for a nose job. What will it be next. Mercedes Benz 300 SL? Picasso original, abortion,
wha.”

  “She has been right on time,” Rachel said, frosty, “in case you are worrying.”

  “Baby,” suddenly all wistful and boyish, “you are a good woman, member of a vanishing race. It is right you should help the less fortunate. But you reach a point.”

  The argument had gone back and forth with neither of them actually getting mad and at three in the morning the inevitable terminal point—bed—to caress away the headaches both had developed. Nothing settled, nothing ever settled. That had been back in September. The gauze beak was gone, the nose now a proud sickle, pointing, you felt, at the big Westchester in the sky where all God’s elect, soon or late, ended up.

  She turned out of the park and walked away from the Hudson on 112th Street. Screwer and screwee. On this foundation, perhaps, the island stood, from the bottom of the lowest sewer bed right up through the streets to the tip of the TV antenna on top of the Empire State Building.

  She entered her lobby, smiled at the ancient doorman; into the elevator, up seven flights to 7G, home, ho, ho. First thing she saw through the open door was a sign on the kitchen wall, with the word PARTY, illuminated by pencil caricatures of the Whole Sick Crew. She tossed the pocketbook on the kitchen table, closed the door. Paola’s handiwork, Paola Maijstral the third roommate. Who had also left a note on the table. “Winsome, Charisma, Fu, and I. V-Note, McClintic Sphere. Paola Maijstral.” Nothing but proper nouns. The girl lived proper nouns. Persons, places. No things. Had anyone told her about things? It seemed Rachel had had to do with nothing else. The main one now being Esther’s nose.

  In the shower Rachel sang a torch song, in a red-hot-mama voice which the tile chamber magnified. She knew it amused people because it came from such a little girl: