The building seemed to shudder with the sigh of the opening door, and a dusting of snow blew into the lobby. Bern stepped inside with the kitten in his arms.
“Oh no,” said Ryszard, the super. He was standing by the elevator doing nothing Bern could see.
“You didn’t witness this,” Bern said. “It won’t concern you.”
“No?” Ryszard scratched his belly. “We’ll all be cat watchers. Day and night. She’ll have us on our hands and knees.”
“She’s a lonely old woman.”
“I’ve swept this floor for eighteen years. Loneliness? It’s like utility bills. Slip slip slip. In your mailbox. Every day.”
The kitten, golden, gray, purred against Bern’s chest.
On the third floor, listing precariously inside the doorway of her apartment, Mrs. Mehl wept. Bern knew she’d never gotten over the loss of her previous cat.
“I thought you’d like the company,” he said. He’d always wanted to do more for her than help her upstairs, now and then, with her grocery sacks. She wore a wool nightgown, now, exposing her veiny ankles. Her skin smelled of Vaseline. She held out her arms and the kitten nuzzled her neck.
“What do you call her? Him?” she said.
“Him, I think. Whatever you want.”
“No. You. Please.”
Names imprinted on Bern during his Torah studies back in Texas came to mind. Childhood lessons with the rabbi. Ishmael, whose moniker means Heard by God. Isaac, He Who Laughs. And who does the Almighty anoint as the Chosen One? The joker. Go figure.
“How about Jacob?” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Bern.”
“I’ll run out and get you some fresh cat food, okay?”
What he didn’t tell her was that the doorman on East Fifty-fourth who’d been offering, all week, free kittens from his building’s overrun basement had found Jacob this morning pawing six of his brothers and sisters. They lay asphyxiated, curled in a heap near a leaking gas pipe. Through tears, the doorman said, “Well, this little fellow’s a survivor. Maybe I should keep him. What happens to him if your old woman keels over tomorrow? She’s pretty frail, you say?”
“I’ll bring him back to you,” Bern said.
The man nodded and bagged up the others. “You see something like this,” he said, “and you don’t know whether you’re meant to hold on to the tragedy part or the miracle part.”
When Bern returned to Mrs. Mehl’s apartment with the cat food, he found the kitten, eyes closed and purring, in her lap. “I’ll just set this over here,” he said, and left the bag on the kitchen floor. The austerity of her place always startled him. The first time he’d carried her groceries up from the lobby, he’d expected Miss Havisham: Old World knickknacks, newspapers and spider webs in the corners. Instead, the space was mostly bare of furniture. A simple hutch displaying blue willow china. Two Eames chairs at a square oak table. A love seat with green and blue embroidered cushions placed neatly on each arm. The décor bespoke a straightforward, elegant life. It struck Bern as admirable.
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Mehl.
“Can I do anything else for you this evening?”
“You can pour me a brandy,” she said. “And have some yourself.” She pointed. Bern located the bottle and two small glasses. “Herbert, my husband, got me in the habit years ago,” she said. “One small shot each night.” He drove a bus for a living, she said, until the morning his heart signaled it had done all the work it was going to do. “I miss him every day,” she confessed, taking a spot on the love seat. Bern sat in one of the chairs.
“And you?” she asked. “I always see you by yourself.”
“Long divorced,” Bern said. “But solitude isn’t so bad.”
“I suppose not. Though you’re young yet, from where I’m perched. Getting old … loneliness isn’t the worst of it. I have happy memories. The worst is being useless. Knowing the world has passed you by with its brand new gadgets and manners. I can’t tell you the number of things I don’t know how to do anymore because the packaging has changed or the mechanisms or the requirements or—ach!” She raised her glass to Bern. “I’m less patient than I used to be because I don’t understand how people can be so shallow. I don’t like this in myself. It’s condescending of me, and I realize it’s because young people are simply inexperienced, and me—I’ve been through so much, I’m barnacled over and can barely move. But still.” She shook her head. “Simple things, like reading the book review. Do you know, last Sunday, in the Times, one reviewer said of a book’s author, ‘He seems the kind of man I’d like to have a beer with,’ as if this were a serious critical judgment, a sound way of evaluating a book’s worth. No. I don’t understand the world anymore.”
She had confused several issues, Bern thought, but she was magnificent in her indignant melancholy. And her brandy tasted fine.
“After Herbert passed, my nephew, Bob, took care of me and tried to keep me up to date. Then drink swept him away.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“A fine painter, Bob. Abstract stuff. Not my cup of tea, but even I could see the boy had talent, and everybody who knew anything about those fellows—Pollock, Rothko, the lot of them—drinkers, too, you know—said Bob was just as good as they were. Did he care? Oh no. No, no, no. Wouldn’t promote himself. Just wanted to paint, he said. The purity of the artist. Pah!”
“Is his work available?” Bern asked to be polite.
“Scattered from here to Kingdom Come. All over Manhattan, in peoples’ apartments, warehouses …”
“And no one’s tried to collect it?” He was getting tired now.
“Are you kidding?” said Mrs. Mehl. “He never kept track of anything. If I had the strength I’d try to find them. I’m sure, if his work was presented to a gallery, those rich old poofters in their penthouses would give him his due. Oh well. Too late now.”
“Bob, you say?”
“Bob Mehl. Could have made something of himself, believe you me. Instead, he left me all alone here with my cat. And then my cat ran away.”
She stroked Jacob, who stretched his short hind legs.
“There are a lot of galleries here in Chelsea. I’ll ask around,” Bern promised.
A little civility at the end of the day. It did wonders.
Pipes howled inside the walls as they usually did when someone turned on a steaming shower in a nearby apartment. The building was ancient, crotchety, full of groans against the naked weight of its occupants.
Architecture, Bern thought. Did it ever really comfort anyone?
Mrs. Mehl leaned forward to breathe the kitten’s fur. Bern washed out his glass. Gently, he pressed the old woman’s hands. He said, “Have a very pleasant evening, Mrs. Mehl.”
“You, too, Mr. Bern.”
The following morning, in his Eighth Street office, Bern sharpened pencils, preparing to make preliminary sketches for a small brownstone renovation. A new task, however humble, was always a joy. What was it Cezanne said? With an apple, I will astonish all of Paris.
Raymond Davis, one of his colleagues, about Bern’s age—maybe a bit closer to sixty—poked his head in the doorway. “That’s it,” he said. “Finito.”
“Raymond?”
“Oh no.” Restructuring: a gloomy refrain in the hallways lately, as the firm brought more youngsters into the fold and enticed or forced retirements at the other end of the scale. Bern figured his time was coming soon.
“What do you say, Wally? An early lunch? Join me in a valedictory shot of tequila?”
“Well—”
“What the hell, eh? For old times’ sake?”
Since he’d had a malignant tumor removed from his right lung two years ago, Davis finished every spoken sentence with an unspoken Tomorrow we die.
“Haven’t I been your pal?” he asked Bern now.
“Yes you have, Raymond.”
Davis said he had to make a stop at the Municipal Archives to check some lot numbers. One last job. “From there, we can walk to Chinatown.”
“Chinese tequila?” Bern asked.
“Let me tell you, you haven’t lived till you’ve imbibed Mandarin firewater.”
Thirty minutes later, Bern stood with Davis in the security line inside the municipal building downtown. The female guard who inspected their IDs and took their pictures, a pretty black woman with long dreadlocks and a smile promising naughtiness, flirted with the male guard who oversaw the metal detector, a tall white man with a gut the size of a housecat. Amid their horseplay, the woman asked Davis and Bern, “What’s your business?” Her boredom was as palpable as the Lysol sting rising in waves from the clean marble floors.
Bern stepped through the metal detector trouble free. Not Davis. No matter how many times he emptied his pockets of change, paper clips, and pens, he set off the alarm. The technology knew: something is wrong with this man. The guard ran a wand over his arms and legs and let him past.
Inside the archives, a bald man in a bland uniform barked at people lining up for birth, death, and marriage records. While Davis leafed through books, Bern stood by a grimy window, dispirited.
“No tenemos,” the bald man snapped at a confused Hispanic woman. She held a slip of paper covered with names and dates. Probably the only links to her past. “You understand me, lady? Go home.”
Davis scribbled the information he needed into a notebook and motioned he was ready to leave.
At the intersection of Park Row, Worth, and Mott, one of the city’s most guarded spots, ringed with traffic barriers and armed officers, the New York Ironworks advertised “50% Off All Rifles and Pistols.”
From discussions of permit requests at the firm, Bern knew restaurant owners were trying to add extra outdoor seating in Chinatown—a push by the city for greater economic stimulus. In genteel neighborhoods, this could be an enhancement. Here, it blocked not only walkers but also deliverymen and cargo loaders. Add to this extra trash bins and the bollard posts erected after 9/11, and you had, Bern thought, an ambulatory crisis.
Davis led him to a modest shop beneath the Manhattan Bridge next to plywood stalls hawking international calling cards and bus tickets. In the shop’s back room, accessed through a thin curtain Bern wouldn’t have noticed on his own, cigarette packs lined the walls. Shuanxshi, Yes, Seven Wolves, Marlboro. “Knockoffs,” Davis said. “Imported illegally. Cheapest smokes in the city.” He bartered with an acne-faced Asian boy over a box of faux Marlboros. Bern wondered how he had discovered this place; Davis had become increasingly reckless after his encounter with the scalpel.
They found a dark bar beneath street level, down sloping concrete steps: forty-year-old American black-light posters (Bern recalled them from his adolescence—peace doves, Adam and Eve naked on a mountaintop), leafy incense. Davis ordered two shots of tequila and lit a cigarette.
“Raymond, should you be smoking?” Bern said.
“You going to be a scold, Wally? Is that why you’re all alone?”
“Sorry.”
“What the hell, you know? Who cares?”
“How is your health?”
“Don’t know. Feel like shit most of the time. What else is new?”
“What are you going to do?” Bern said.
“Beats me.” Davis raised his glass. Bern toasted him. “Eighteen years. And what? One day you’re here, next day poof. Ah well. I should never have gotten into this racket in the first place. I blame my dad.”
“Was he an architect?”
“Ham radio operator. Back in Indiana. He planted an enormous steel tower in our front yard so he could yak at Sweden. Or Australia. Damn thing threw a huge shadow on my bedroom wall. I was afraid it would topple, some night, in a thunderstorm and crush me. I think I’ve always longed for a safe space.”
The tequila numbed Bern’s lips. He felt his mouth hover an inch or two from his face above the paper placemat with its cryptic Chinese horoscopes.
“Dad thought talk was a nuclear deterrent,” Davis said. “Make enough friends worldwide, we’ll all be okay.” He threw back his drink. “What a nut. One more?”
“No,” Bern said. “I really should—”
“Right. You’ve still got a job.”
“Low blow, Raymond. So do you, technically. Unless you want me to take those numbers in.”
“Sorry, Wally.”
“It’s all right. Shall we?”
“I’m going to stay for another.”
“You’re sure?”
Davis grinned like a Halloween skull. Bern laid two bills on the table. “Okay. On me,” he said.
“Wally. You trying to belittle me?”
A crazy impulse—the alcohol and the incense: Bern grabbed the back of Davis’s neck and kissed the top of his head. “Take care of yourself, Raymond.”
A walk to clear his mind, a chocolate shop for an espresso and a cherry truffle, a CD store (the only one remaining in this neighborhood). Some late-night music: Ahmad Jamal, Abdullah Ibrahim. And this nifty little item: Jordi Savall. Medieval ballads. Dreams of sacred order.
It was a relief to ascend to the thin crust of legal amenities after witnessing the world’s actual business, the scrabbling, seething back-dealing underneath the streets.
He passed an old water fountain, long out of service, in a locked-up city park. No more dipping into the public well, because no more public wells.
A couple of subway trips and he found himself in Chelsea again: a gallery district. He remembered his promise to Mrs. Mehl. In a swift stroke, the thought of her made him lonely, a thudding sensation like losing his breath.
The first two docents he spoke to had never heard of her nephew. The third place he entered, the Pavel Zoubok Gallery, displayed four or five Joseph Cornell boxes. An apple-cheeked girl with short black hair was quoting prices to two apparently serious buyers. Waiting, Bern observed the boxes: Celestial Navigation, a star map, sand, delicate clear drinking glasses filled with marbles, stamps, and driftwood. The Storm That Never Came, paper cutout sparrows nestled among grasses beneath a map of the constellation Scorpio and a textbook scrap demonstrating wind patterns. Bern wanted to crawl inside a box and cozy up to the universe. He overheard one of the buyers call the docent Nora. When they left, he asked Nora if the owner was around. He was not but she knew about Bob Mehl. “Oh yeah, his stuff was legendary,” she said. “Me and my friends at NYU used to hear about him. He didn’t have a studio of his own. He’d hang out in his friends’ lofts in SoHo, paint like a madman, two or three a day sometimes, and they were brilliant, just brilliant, and he’d leave them with people or give them away.”
“Have you seen his work?” Bern asked.
“Not personally, but everyone says they’re knockouts.”
“Where might I find his paintings?”
“Oh my.” She scratched her head. “I wouldn’t know where to start. A lot of his friends—that ’70s–’80s art crowd, you know—they’re gone now. AIDs. High rents.”
’70s–’80s! Bern had assumed ’50s–’60s—Mrs. Mehl had mentioned Jackson Pollock—but of course, now that he thought about it, it didn’t make sense that her nephew would be that old.
“Okay, thanks,” he said. As he turned for the door, he was dazzled by the wings of an angel, sitting in one of the boxes along with a thimble, a gold coin, and a clear glass cube.
That night, Mrs. Mehl confirmed that her nephew was younger than Bern imagined. She looked better late in the day than she did in the mornings before she’d had her breakfast and a session at the makeup mirror. Still, she complained. “Osteo and arthritis,” she said, rubbing her calves. The kitten lay on a cushion and lifted its head reluctantly when Bern approached.
“Would you like me to make an appointment for you with the doctor?” he asked.
“No no, all that fuss and nonsense.”
Bern considered her sagging skin and the backs of his own rough hands. Maybe she was stronger than he thought. Stronger than he was. Possibly, kvetching kept her alive.
Who could he complain to? Maybe he should get a cat.
He realized that taking care of Mrs. Mehl these days was his best and most lasting achievement—certainly more substantial than anything he conceived at work. Well. Good enough, he reasoned.
“Pleasant evening, Mrs. Mehl.”
“You too, Mr. Bern.”
* * *
In the next few days—solitude isn’t so bad, really it’s not!—he tried a couple of other galleries with no success. One night, walking home, he passed an IRS office, stacks of 1040 forms in its window. That time of year again: reach for the coffee spoons, measure out your life.
No dependents.
Nothing to depend on.
Really, it’s not so bad.
Turning a corner, he glimpsed a newsstand headline: rockin’ sockin’ Earl Palmer had died. “Tutti Frutti,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” “I Hear You Knocking.” Bern couldn’t count the tunes whose spines Palmer stiffened with his backbeat. It was years ago, during the Torah studies with the rabbi in Houston, that Bern had learned of the drummer. Each week, once the lessons were over, he walked home with other teens discussing their favorite songs. King David’s sexcapades aroused the boys, but not like rock ‘n’ roll.
What a contrast! The barrenness of Rebekah followed by wet dreams of Dizzy Miss Lizzie. Bern believed the 45s he bought helped him find depths in the Five Books of Moses he wouldn’t have noticed otherwise: Hagar, Sarah’s abused servant, decked out like Lady Day. Strange Fruit in the Garden. Goin’ to Kansas City, surely the Promised Land. Sarah scoffed when the Lord told her she would bear a son: “Am I, a withered old woman, to experience pleasure again with my dried-up old husband?” And God’s flirtatious reply: “Do you think anything is beyond me—your Lord? On your knees, woman! Get ready!” Oh yeah! You give me fever!
These days, you couldn’t buy a 45 single to save your life.
Whenever Bern got home after meeting the rabbi, his grandfather, who had insisted on the lessons, saw the happy flush in Bern’s cheeks and knew something was wrong. The lessons must not be taking. If they were, they wouldn’t be so exhilarating.
Frequently, after dinner, he waved a photograph in Bern’s face—a sepia portrait of Bern’s great-great-grandfather, Jacob, taken in Budapest. No one knew when. A wheatlike, long white beard, a slender Ashkenazi nose, a round black hat. “His namesake wrestled an angel!” Bern’s grandfather admonished him. “He wrestled fascists in Europe! And you? You lie in bed at night, with that jungle noise grinding on the radio, and tug on your little petseleh! Aren’t you ashamed?”
The picture of Jacob was one of his grandfather’s few possessions at the end. Bern recalled seeing it in the rest home just before his grandfather died, his last raspy gasps buzzing like a Passover plague.
The old man had once traveled to Budapest and found the graveyard where family lore said Jacob had been laid. The headstones were inscribed in Hebrew; Bern’s grandfather, who did not read the language, had failed to foresee this eventuality. He couldn’t identify Jacob’s resting spot or even prove he was there. Ever since, he’d said, he felt more rootless than ever.
Tell me about it, Bern thought. Earl Palmer dead. Jesus.
At Fifth and Fifty-third now, he faced St. Thomas Church and recalled his first defiant moment as a Jew. It coincided with a feeling that he would live forever and always be loved. After Torah study one night, Bern and his friends were walking home down an oak-lined avenue. They passed a bland building shadowed by a spire topped with an iron cross. Bern stared at the place. It confused him, architecturally. Apparently a Christian church. He had never really noticed Christian churches, but he thought they all had, as a matter of course, stained glass windows. The windows here were smudged and plain. While he stood, a nun appeared on the doorstep, the wings of her habit flapping like a gull’s. She looked like Natalie Wood. Her beauty stunned him. “Wouldn’t you like to join us for mass?” she said. With the force of a tsunami welling up from Eastern Europe, Bern blurted, “Shalom!” Laughing, his friends ran down the street. The young nun smiled at him. “Shalom,” she said. “May the Virgin be with you.” That night he dreamed of an Ashkenazi Miss Lizzie with Natalie Wood’s big eyes.
* * *
Mrs. Mehl saw him in the lobby late that Saturday evening and told him a joke. “What do you call a pile of cats?”
“I don’t know,” Bern said.
“A meow-tain.” She laughed and laughed, spry old thing. Jacob seemed to be doing her good.
Bern wished her shuvua tov.
The following Monday at lunch he checked another gallery on her behalf. Or his—after all, the quest for her nephew gave him something to do. In the guest book by the entrance, visitors wrote to the featured artist, “Always a pleasure!” “Such joy, reacquainting myself with your exquisite compositions!” The work was a series of black and white photographs of an S and M parlor, men and women binding and hitting one another.
Murphy, one of the firm’s new hires, caught Bern when he returned to the office. “Hey,” he said. Bern’s supervisor had asked him to collaborate with Murphy on a low-income housing project over in Little Italy. “I like your latest sketches,” Murphy said. His hair touched the tops of his ears—shaggier than Bern had seen it. He was working hard, keeping long hours. He won’t rest until he’s nailed my job as well as his own, Bern thought.
“Thanks,” he said.
“I admire your patience, Wally. Really. Your attention to detail. I’m too restless for my own damn good. More of an ideas guy.”
“We all have our strengths,” Bern said.
“Maybe by the time I’ve been here as long as you have, gotten married and settled down … are you married, Wally?”
“No.”
“Isn’t it funny I didn’t know that?” He fiddled with his hair. “You work with someone for months, maybe even years, and know so little about them.”
“Yes.”
Murphy looked at his shoes. “So. I guess it’s been hard on you. I can’t imagine.”
“This thing with Raymond.”
Bern shrugged. “His productivity had slipped. We all knew it.”
“Yeah, but …”
“What?”
“Well, the—”
“What?”
“Oh shit. Well … oh shit. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Wally, they found Raymond—”
Bern groaned.
“Yeah. In a little B and B over by the Bowery. Two or three days ago. Apparently, it happened in his sleep. Heart attack or a stroke. Maybe the booze.”
“They? Who’s they?”
“I don’t know. The owners, I guess.”
“What was he doing there?”
“Beats me. He was always sort of a loner, huh?”
“I don’t know,” Bern said. “Honestly. I didn’t see him much outside of work.”
“He sure talked an edgy game.”
“He was never the same after his …” Bern touched his chest.
“Well, anyway. I’m sorry.” Murphy patted his arm. “The sketches look great. It’s a neat little project. How does it feel?”
Bern glanced at the pencils in his pocket: the erasers he had chewed and chewed again. “Fine,” he said. “It feels fine.”
He didn’t know Davis well enough to grieve. He didn’t seem to know anyone anymore except Mrs. Mehl. How had he come to this? Had he stopped trying? On the subway he distracted himself eavesdropping on two men sitting nearby. They were discussing a boxer they used to watch on television. “I loved that guy,” one of the fellows said. “He was synonymous with taking it in the face.”
A Hispanic lady sat beside Bern, her patient expression reminding him of the woman in the Municipal Archives (“no tenemos”) as well as of pictures he’d once seen of the sainted Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi. In Barcelona, years ago, in a perishingly hot museum, Bern had seen some of Gaudi’s models. He had suspended strings, like webs, from the ceiling using weights, and then he’d studied the designs in a mirror he’d placed on the floor, to see how buildings constructed that way might look: as though the structure were suspended from the ground up.
Strings and mirrors, Bern thought. Simple huts, as spare as Mrs. Mehl’s apartment. Surely there is still need in the world for humble objects, humble surroundings.
Thinking of Davis—would anyone say Kaddish for such a man?—he remembered the temple in Houston, a modest A-frame, as humble a structure as you could find, where he attended evening services with his grandfather during the Days of Awe. It overlooked a trickle of Buffalo Bayou; amid the singing and chanting, Bern heard water. His favorite part of the service was Ne’ilah, holding hands with others in golden candlelight, asking God’s forgiveness. “The gates are closing,” the rabbi intoned. For Bern, even as a child, this was an architectural detail embodying many thoughts: the past shut away, chances lost, belonging (enclosed inside a sweet, holy space).
And the hut … each year, following Yom Kippur, his grandfather took him to a placid bend of the bayou. There, men constructed Sukkot—temporary shelters filled with bread and fruits in honor of the huts in which the Israelites had dwelt in the desert. Some of these huts were made of plywood, some of aluminum, as precise as a Joseph Cornell box; Bern saw tents made of sheets (to evoke the Cloud of Glory in which the Children of Israel were said to have been shielded by God). He prayed with his grandfather and watched men haul water from the stream in ritual echoes of ancient pleas for rain. They quoted Isaiah: “And you shall draw waters with joy from the wells of salvation.” Buffalo Bayou was hardly a Well of Salvation; it was clotted with mud and trash; the scum on its twiggy surface stank of organic decay.
“According to the Talmud, the minimum height of the Sechach—the covering of the Sukkot—is ten tefachim,” the rabbi told him once. “In terms we understand, that means the height of a man seated at table.”
From that moment, human scale had been, for Bern, a central design principle.
“The walls can be made of any material,” the rabbi said, “but they must be sufficiently strong to stand in an average wind.” Average? The bayou was an elm-lined Corridor of Storms. Nothing average about it. Already, as a boy, contemplating the beauty and necessity of shelter, Bern pondered escape hatches.
Buildings rise. Buildings fall.
Friends and colleagues come and go.
But in any arrangement, he thought, there were openings.
The gates are closing?
No. Solitude doesn’t have to mean the end.
On tax day, Bern proved his existence by signing forms and slipping them into an official drop box on the corner of Twenty-third and Fifth. The box slammed shut with a thwack.
He was on his way to the Larissa Goldston Gallery. Prickly people swarmed the space. On display, a late series of prints by Robert Rauschenberg. The visitors were quick to take offense with one another, grumbling at the slightest nudge or obstructed view. The tax man had crushed everyone’s spirit. Bern felt a draining away of his faith in humanity, but then a stone goat’s head in one of the collages, side by side with a purple lotus blossom and a bright Chinese billboard featuring a smiling mother and her child, charmed him. He stared for several minutes until a woman in a fake fur coat bumped him out of the way.
The docent, an anorexic named Tamara greeted him at her desk. On the phone, the day before, she had told him she’d known Bob Mehl and owned his most significant paintings. She kept them in a back room at the gallery. Now Bern introduced himself. She tugged one of her earrings, a large gold loop, as though she’d tear her flesh. “I guess you want to see ‘em, huh?” she said.
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
He followed her into the next room and helped her pull two big canvases (as tall as Bern) from a storage closet. On each surface, a yellow bloom of paint spread across three red lines placed vertically in the center. “Yeah, I know,” said the girl, watching his face. “Not bad, but nothing special, huh?”
“This is it?”
“Far as I know. The Complete Works. The Mehlian Oeuvre.”
“But I’ve heard—”
“I know what you’ve heard. We’ve all heard it. For years.” She shook her head. Her slick black hair didn’t move. “It’s why I’ve kept these. If the rumors get frenzied enough, the perception—well, who knows what these could be worth, though frankly I’m not holding my breath. You’re friends with his aunt, right? I’m not in the business of stirring false hopes.” She popped two pieces of Spearmint gum into her mouth. “It’s possible these paintings could bring in some money someday. But it’s not likely. Her nephew was a drunk. And, in my opinion, a middling artist. What he’s got going for him are stories. Buzz.”
“Radiant genius. Tragic hero.”
“Right. The art world loves that shit. We all do. But that’s what they are. Stories.”
“How did they get started?”
She shrugged. “Isn’t it usually a lover? Trying to make herself feel important?”
“All right,” Bern said, as weary as he’d ever felt. “I’ll tell his aunt.” In fact, he wasn’t shocked. From the beginning, the excitement generated by Bob Mehl’s name, in gallery after gallery, had a strained and surrealistic quality to it.
On his way out the door, he jostled a man’s shoulder. “Watch it!” the fellow growled. Bern gave him a goat smile.
* * *
Businessmen rushed up the streets, waving sharp envelopes high above their heads. Their nefarious schemes calculated to the penny. Bern dodged them, to keep his bones intact.
What would he tell Mrs. Mehl?
My feelings! he cried in his head. What earthly good do they do? For me, Bob Mehl? Anyone? Day after day, this whipsaw submission to moods! Now I’ll go to work (passing Raymond’s empty office); I’ll smile and expect smiles in return. Too much!
Isn’t solitude a preferable mode of being?
Yes. Believe it.
Walking swiftly, he passed an internet café. Grimy. Newspapers piled on the floor. Chaotic images inked on wrinkled paper. Not a single female in the place. Pale, underfed boys hovering around clamorous screens. The room smelled sweet: stale aftershave. I am your future, Bern thought, staring straight at the kids. To buoy himself, he stepped inside the open doorway and bought a bar of chocolate.
That evening, tired of his self-burden, surely the price of his solitude, he entered the lobby of his building and ran into Ryszard. He snapped apart the chocolate bar and handed half of it to the mumbling old grump. Ryszard leaned on his broom.
Bern told him about Bob Mehl.
“Well, now the Queen will have something else to bellyache about,” Ryszard said.
“Admit it,” Bern said. “You kind of like the old girl.”
“No. Absolutely not. Anything that is going to outlast me gives me the shivers.”
“You may be right about that.”
“Trust me. My grandchildren will be feeding her cats.”
“How long are you going to sweep these floors?”
“It’s true, my tochas aches every night,” said Ryszard. “But, you know, this is my home now. I must say, it’s been a good life, all in all. My father was a fruit peddler in Poland. Cold winter mornings. Second-hand wagon. Always a busted axle. The horses had pleurisy. Me, I guess I can manage a cranky old woman. Speak of the devil …”
Mrs. Mehl bumped through the door grappling a grocery sack. Lettuce and turnips. Bern hadn’t seen her up and about in a week. He rushed to help her. She relinquished her grip and the bag fell into his arms. Without a word she waddled to the elevator. Then she stopped, turned, and said, “Mr. Ryszard, you have a disgusting and childlike smear of chocolate on your upper lip.”
He covered his mouth. “Sorry,” he whispered.
“You may take Jacob for his evening walk in half an hour.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Suppressing a smile, Bern followed her into the elevator, clutching her groceries. He still wasn’t sure how to broach the topic of her nephew, but he would find a way. There was always an opening. Mrs. Mehl seemed to thrive on this certainty, and had for many years.
“A brandy, Mr. Bern?”
“Thank you. I’d love one, Mrs. Mehl.”
She pushed a button. The building engaged pulleys, cables, and gears to lift them.