The Tenants of Moonbloom Read online

  “Alert,” Norman repeated, smiling helplessly at his grotto.

  “Yes, alert. I depend on you to take care of all those details. God knows I can’t be bothered with that nonsense. You are supposed to run just those four houses, collect the rent, take care of the few managerial details. I am involved with much more complicated transactions—I certainly can’t take time out from these much more important things to worry about cockroaches and toilets, now can I, Norm?” He was so reasonable that Norman was tempted to kiss the mouthpiece.

  “Certainly not, Irwin.”

  “Now I’m not saying that I invented the job for you, but there certainly wouldn’t be any point to my keeping the houses if you weren’t there to handle it. I’m not being unreasonable now, am I, Normy?”

  “Who ever said . . .”

  “It isn’t too much for me to expect you to free me from those little things, is it?”

  “No, Irwin.” He tried it again silently, exaggerating the movements of his lips.

  “I mean, I deal in transactions that run upwards of six figures. I carry my work home with me. My work is never done. The pressures on me are rannana.”

  Norman smiled at the slip into sermon.

  “How in the world can you allow windows to get broken, Norman?”

  “Allow?”

  “It aggravates me no end.”

  “Tell me why you jumped at the window? I told you the whole building is . . .”

  “Some things cannot be helped. Call them acts of God.”

  “So why not windows too?”

  “Norman, I have no time to quibble. Just take care of those petty things without calling me. Don’t you have any initiative?”

  “Initiative I could perhaps dig up. But, Irwin, for the roof, the banister, the plumbing, the electricity, for those things I need money.”

  “You know you have complete freedom to write checks on that corporation’s account. I give you complete freedom of action on that. It isn’t necessary to call me every time you want to buy a bulb.”

  “Blood from a stone, Irwin. The cupboard is bare, empty, depleted. In fact, it is below zero—I owe a two-dollar fine for overdrawing.”

  “Oh Norman!”

  “I know, I’m a crazy spendthrift, I spend on blondes and the race track.”

  “I’m not saying that. But you are a poor manager.”

  “And I owe Gaylord.”

  “Gaylord is a shiftless shwartsa. He’s not worth anything.”

  “That is irrelevant. For forty dollars a week you don’t get a professional to take care of four buildings.”

  “Do you realize that my time is worth fifty dollars an hour? This conversation must have cost thirty-five dollars.”

  Norman waited a few minutes out of respect. Then in a gentle voice he continued. “Now, on Seventieth Street the elevator didn’t pass inspection and the water is rusty in all the kitchen faucets. On Second Avenue the wiring is so bad that the inspector wouldn’t take a bribe, said he drew the line at murder.”

  “Stop it, Norman.”

  “On Mott Street there is imminent disaster. The wall is swelling next to the toilet—it’s going to collapse on poor Basellecci. Also, the grace period on the insurance is up at the end of the week . . .”

  “God damn it, Norman!”

  “Then there are the appliances on Seventieth Street. Jacoby’s—no, it was Hauser’s—I think. . .. Anyhow, there are several stoves that don’t work, and one . . .”

  “Just shut up! I’ll put five hundred dollars in the account tomorrow morning, and then do not let me hear from you for a long, long time!”

  The tiny click in the receiver couldn’t begin to suggest the force with which Irwin must have slammed down the phone. Norman felt a certain sense of nobility in putting his phone back on the cradle with exquisite delicacy. Then he had to smile wanly at the dusty, secondhand sunlight and the misspelled obscenities chalked in the well his office rested in.

  “Five hundred dollars,” he said in the tone of a man echoing his doctor’s grim prediction. “Five hun-dred dollars.” Still, it was only a minor plaint; he was not prone to self-pity but did allow a certain humorous sympathy for himself. He opened his palm as though testing for rain. He shrugged. Finally he took out one of the several ball-point pens in his shirt pocket and began trying to assign priorities for the things he had to do. Ten things were tied for first place, and he approximated the estimated costs.

  A few people put on heads and peered down at him from the sidewalk above. They were attracted by his being behind glass, but more, perhaps, because they were drawn to the black letters on the window, letters that struck the ear of the eye with a softly melancholy and alliterative note.

  I. MOONBLOOM REALTY CORP.

  Norman Moonbloom—Agent

  From his side of the glass, Norman always saw in the letters a resemblance to the Russian alphabet, and noticed too how the family name was almost symmetrical, with the same OO on either side of the terse NBL—like bookends. But right then he was not inclined to muse. He was trying to divide a huge number into a tiny one, and the sweat stood out on his small, gambler-white face with its blue-tinted cheeks and chin, its large pregnant-woman eyes. The effort was painful, and he bit his thin, childlike mouth. Suddenly the obvious simile occurred to him, and he put down the pen to laugh wretchedly. “Like an elephant trying to make love to a mouse,” he said aloud. His humor made him close his eyes, as against the splashing of some caustic liquid.

  The watered-down sunlight laid the window letters in a ribbon of shadow over floor and desk and man. One of the many O’s made a daguerreotype of his blinded face. There had been no horrors in his life—only a slow widening of sensitivity. But he anticipated reaching the threshold of pain one of these days. It was like the fear of death; he could ignore it most of the time, although it was implacably there, to touch him with the very tip of its claw in moments of frustration, to bring dread to him during the 4:00 A.M. bladder call. The claw withdrew after just a touch, leaving him with a chronic, unrecognizable din that he did not think about; he was like a man who lives beside a foaming cataract and comes to take its roar for silence.

  The thought came to him that he might find solutions if he changed pace. He resolutely opened his eyes. “I’ll get a head start on myself, I’ll start with the rents tonight. Yes, the rents,” he said. He stood up to five feet seven inches, and the O now made a target of his chest.

  His eyes crept over the small office; as always, he was slightly chagrined at the realization that his occupation had no real equipment beyond the receipt book and the ball-point pens. Still, his rather sad expression held no trace of bitterness. He had been a student until his thirty-second year, mainly because both he and his brother had been unable to see him as anything else. But a year ago he had closed the podiatry book with quiet finality: his last major after accounting, art, literature, dentistry, and the rabbinate. It had become clear to him that whatever talents he might have, he would never learn a special skill. Irwin had taken a grandfather’s inheritance in cash; Norman had taken his in an unbroken string of semesters, fourteen years long. Now he worked for his brother at a small salary. Yet he sensed that justice had been done, and, optimistically, he wasn’t convinced that his use of the money mightn’t pay off in some oblique way. He worked too hard, even sharing some of the menial labor with the roving superintendent, Gaylord Knight, yet he felt that it would take a lot to extinguish him.

  Wandering over to the file cabinet, he wrote “Astolat” with his finger in the dust on its top. The finished word made the shabby showcase of an office into a queer place; the sheafs of bills and receipts, spiked or corralled in several “In” boxes, became cryptic symbols. He smiled, creasing his blackish eyelids and lifting his long-lobed ears (he could wiggle them at will). The walls were a fleshy pink and made of embossed tin like a cooky box. The linoleum was worn to a dirty hair color and was patched here and there with unevenly cut rectangles against the inroads of mice. />
  He spent a minute touching a few things on his desk. Then he put on his hat, a pearl-gray fedora with an immense crown and brim that made him look like a child imitating a gangster. He put on his suit jacket (also too large for his thin, slight body) and tucked the receipt book in its breast pocket.

  Outside, in the pungency of the worn air, he sighed with premonitory tiredness. He locked the door, went up the steps, and headed for the subway that would take him to the upper West Side of town. He walked lightly and his face showed no awareness of all the thousands of people around him because he traveled in an eggshell through which came only subdued light and muffled sound.

  2

  HE WENT INTO the lobby and frowned at the new markings penciled on the walls. The refectory furniture disapproved, too, and the phony arches seemed threatened by the reality of the present. He kicked testingly at a loosened octagon of tile, peered up at the one bulb in the manorial chandelier. In the elevator he listened to the noisy motor and tried not to read the notice that said the elevator had not passed inspection. Rising in the slapping whine, he settled as usual for that modest ascent; he considered his ups and and downs insignificant. Someone had scratched “Emperors” on the spackled wall next to an old, already rusting drawing of male and female genitals. He sighed and looked upward. The life in the building moved dimly around him like the pulsing movement perceived through new ice.

  “The rent,” he said in no particular way when the anemic-looking youth opened the door.

  “Oh yeah, just a minute,” Lester said, half letting him in and tucking back his long pompadoured hair. “Aunt Min, the rent,” he called over his shoulder.

  “Right in the middle of everything,” Minna said in an undertone; her mottled baby face was spongey under the powder and rouge. “Come in, come in. Sit down. I’ll have to get the . . .” She took the rest of the sentence into her bedroom as her sister, Eva, stepped out of the kitchen with a dish towel.

  “Hello,” Norman said to her.

  “Does that sign on the elevator mean it’s not safe?” Eva had the face of an old squaw and beauty-parlor blue hair. She squinted, deepening her self-made wrinkles.

  “Just a technicality.” Norman sat brightly institutional, his gangster hat on his knee.

  “I’d hate to fall into the basement on a technicality,” Lester said, raising an eyebrow. As Beloved Nephew, he knew his audience.

  His aunt Eva laughed with her hand up to her mouth; there was a sex shyness in her attitude, the look of a young woman with her lover who suddenly finds her situation excitingly altered by the presence of a stranger. It was not at all funny with that rugged Iroquois face of hers.

  Her sister came back into the room with her pocketbook. “What’s funny?” Minna asked, looking to choose sides. And then seeing that it had to do with Lester, she threw aside reservation and made ready to laugh wholeheartedly.

  “Mr. Moonbloom said the sign on the elevator was just a technicality, and Lester said, ‘I’d hate to fall into the basement on a technicality.’ ”

  Minna smiled, and her feeling was so strong that she had to pat down a stray tuft of hair on her nephew’s head. “Lester,” she said.

  The two sisters ran their eyes through the head of the reedy, soft-soaked-looking young man, who stood with apparent insouciance between them. Norman could see, however, that the angle of his weak head was determined by the line of their common glance. Lester stretched like a pet cat. The light came through a bulb-burned lamp shade and cast old-penny color over the three of them. Norman checked the ceiling for falling plaster amidst their antique silence. A tiny mark showed on the shell of his consciousness. His big hat moistened in his hand.

  “Well,” he said in subtle consolation.

  Minna took a breath that seemed to make a snapping sound. “I suppose we’d just better pay the man,” she said.

  “That’s the idea,” Lester said, jabbing adorably at his older aunt.

  “Oh, Lester,” Eva said. Like her sister, she could not say the name without feeling.

  The light in there was like a smell, and when Norman got out into the hallway he took a deep breath and let it out a little at a time.

  •

  “Come in, young man. Make yourself at home.” Arnold Jacoby had a soldering iron in his hand. Toylike and small, he seemed heated up by the tool, and his old face was rosy. “Setting up for supper. Maybe you’ll join us? Betty doesn’t fuss. At our age, Campbell’s soup fills the bill. It’s just a question of opening another can. Nothing to it. Love to have you.”

  “Well, that’s very nice of you, but I have a lot of calls . . .” For some reason he pictured himself on errands of mercy in the midst of a plague. He patted the breast pocket, checking or indicating the receipt book there.

  “Nonsense. Cup of instant coffee? Young fella like you can’t be in all that much of a hurry!”

  “Well I . . .”

  “I mean you get to our age . . . you should hurry then. I mean, to put it in terms of your profession . . . I like to talk the other fella’s language—kind of indicates a little interest in what the other fella does, you know? Like I talk to the kids, I try to throw in a little of their talk. Cool, man, like crazy, hah? Well, you know what I mean. So to get back to your profession, I’ll put it in your terms. At my age you have to think in short-term leases. . ..” He chuckled modestly. “Yeh, yeh, short-term leases.”

  Norman heh-heh’ed politely, his hands out in an inconspicuous breast stroke.

  “Oh, not that we let it get us down. We keep busy. Betty!” he roared suddenly, making Norman feel for a moment that he had walked into a trap. “For instance, I’m a modelmaker by trade—work for a big outfit, doing all their model work. But on my own time I do a little puttering.” He looked up with a coy, provocative expression.

  “Puttering?” Norman said.

  Apparently it had been delivered in just the right tone of voice. The old, toylike face colored pleasurably. “Ah, ah hah,” he said, waving a finger, arch now, convinced he had Norman panting with curiosity. He was something of a tease, but his teasing had been dragged a long way without getting rough, so you knew that it had never been cruelty.

  “Betty!” he roared again. This time Norman only twitched slightly. Arnold Jacoby pushed him into a flowered armchair that embraced him like quicksand. “Well I’ll tell you what I putter with. I invent things. I’m an inventor!”

  “My, my,” Norman said, furtively drawing the receipt book out. He waited a courteous few seconds and then, just as Arnold’s mouth started to fit qualifying words, said “One of these days you’ll have to tell me more about it. I’d love to hear about it now, but I have a few things to take care . . . Let’s see, I make it out to be sixty-three dollars and twenty cents, right, Mr. Jacoby?”

  “Call me Arnold—makes me feel more part of things. I’m seventy-three, but ‘Mr. Jacoby’ still sounds like my father. Dead a half-century this February. Oh, fine man, fine man. Great respecter of the human mind and spirit. Nothing crass about that man. ’Course it made him a failure—same as me. But then, I don’t think you’re a failure if to your own self you’re true.”

  “Shall I make the receipt out to you or your wife, I forget, Mr. . . . ah, Arnold?”

  “Doesn’t matter really, does it? Not that receipt. But you just sit tight—have some instant java. Betty!”

  “Don’t shout so, Arnold,” the old woman said, shuffling in with a bridge table. “Hello there, Mr. Moonbloom.”

  “Mrs. Jacoby.” He tried to get up, but Arnold pushed him back into the billowing upholstery.

  “Of course you’ll have coffee, a little soup too,” she said. She appeared somewhat older than her husband, already in her eighties. She was extraordinarily beautiful in the dim light they maintained there. Her face was not much wrinkled, only whitened like a sun-bleached painting. In the soft light they lived by she might still appear desirable to Arnold. There was something odd and exotic about her and about what was between them: a co
nstant commemoration of passion, a special clause in their relationship which created a tension unusual between people of their age.

  “Why’d you have to drag that table in, Bet? Could have asked me.” Arnold stood in a rather ludicrous pose that Norman puzzled over for a few minutes, until it struck him that Arnold was holding his aged, paunchy figure like a man in the initial stages of courtship. Arnold squared his shoulders and bounded over to take the table from her. “Here, let me do that.” His voice was an octave lower, the meandering ease of an old man strained out. He put the soldering iron down, flipped the table over dexterously, and opened the legs. Then he set it down in front of Norman’s chair, blocking him in. “There we go,” he said crisply.

  His wife brought in three bowls of soup, a lover-like and secret smile on her face. Norman sat rigidly, clutching his ball-point pen and receipt book, staring at the steaming soup and the two old, deceptive faces. Arnold stood behind his wife’s chair as she sat down, and then he sat down himself. The old woman folded her hands and moved her lips soundlessly. Arnold stared defiantly at the wall. When he caught Norman’s bewildered eye, he said, “I’m a freethinker.”

  Norman nodded. Then, with a quick, desperate look around, he bolted up and over the arm of the chair.

  The two old people looked at him with make-believe surprise. He was not part of their peculiar charade, and they seemed to see him dimly now.

  “I have to rush along,” he shouted. “Business waits for no man.”

  “Oh well, certainly,” Arnold said. “Got to be on your toes.”

  “Every waking minute,” Norman said, walking away on his toes.

  “Oh, the rent,” Betty said. “You forgot . . .”

  “Be back for it tomorrow. Got to run,” he called from the doorway.

  “I’ll look for you,” she said.

  “Yes, thank you, okay.” He stepped into the hallway. The window at the landing showed the color of ice, and the hallway was made lonely by the muffled sounds of supper dishes and the fugitive smells of cooking. It was a time of constant movement for Norman. For some reason, he could not bear to eat alone at that hour; his loneliness was compressed to diamond hardness by the meeting of day and evening. Later, in his own apartment, he would be able to eat, and read as he ate. The darkness and the totality of night would make his solitary condition familiarly comfortable, and he would be able to convince himself that he was set in his ways and desired no change. Only the traditional supper hour of families recalled old hopes whose shapelessness had been glorious in prospect but which were unbearably irrelevant in retrospect.