Dying Inside

We faced each other uncertainly, and he moved toward me, digging his fingers momentarily into the muscle of my arm, telling me without words to shape up, to ride out the storm, to get myself together. He was so open that my mind sank unexpectedly into his, and I saw him plain, his goodness, his kindness, his sorrow. Out of him an image rose to me, a sharp encapsulated memory: himself and a sobbing, demolished Toni, the night before last, lying naked together on his modish round bed, her head cradled against his muscular hairy chest, his hands fondling the pale heavy globes of her breasts. Her body trembling with need. His unwilling drooping manhood struggling to offer her the consolation of sex. His gentle spirit at war with itself, flooded with pity and love for her but dismayed by her disturbing femaleness, those breasts, that cleft, her softness. You don’t have to, Bob, she keeps saying, you don’t have to, you really don’t have to, but he tells her he wants to, it’s about time we made it after knowing each other all these years, it’ll cheer you up, Toni, and anyway a man needs a little variety, right? His heart goes out to her but his body resists, and their lovemaking, when it happens, is a hurried, pathetic, fumbled thing, a butting of troubled reluctant bodies, ending in tears, tremors, shared distress, and, finally, laughter, a triumph over pain. He kisses her tears away. She thanks him gravely for his efforts. They fall into childlike sleep, side by side. How civilized, how tender. My poor Toni. Goodbye. Goodbye. “I’m glad she went to you,” I said. He walked me to the elevator. What shall I cry? “If she snaps out of it I’ll make sure she calls you,” he told me. I put my hand to his arm as he had to mine, and gave him the best smile in my repertoire. Goodbye.

NINETEEN.

This is my cave. Twelve floors high in the Marble Hill Houses, Broadway and 228th Street, formerly a middle-income municipal housing project, now a catchall for classless and deracinated urban detritus. Two rooms plus bathroom, kitchenette, hallway. Once upon a time you couldn’t get into this project unless you were married and had kids. Nowadays a few singles have slipped in, on the grounds that they’re destitute. Things change as the city decays; regulations break down. Most of the building’s population is Puerto Rican, with a sprinkling of Irish and Italian. In this den of papists a David Selig is a great anomaly. Sometimes he thinks he owes his neighbors a daily lusty rendition of the Shma Yisroel, but he doesn’t know the words. Kol Nidre, perhaps. Or the Kaddish. This is the bread of affliction which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. He is lucky to have been led out of Egypt into the Promised Land.

Would you like the guided tour of David Selig’s cave? Very well. Please come this way. No touching anything, please, and don’t park your chewing gum on the furniture. The sensitive, intelligent, amiable, neurotic man who will be your guide is none other than David Selig himself. No tipping allowed. Welcome, folks, welcome to my humble abode. We’ll begin our tour in the bathroom. See, this is the tub — that yellow stain in the porcelain was already there when he moved in — this is the crapper, this is the medicine chest. Selig spends a great deal of time in here; it’s a room significant to any in-depth understanding of his existence. For example, he sometimes takes two or three showers a day. What is it, do you think, that he’s trying to wash away? Leave that toothbrush alone, sonny. All right, come with me. Do you see these posters in the hallway? They are artifacts of the 1960’s. This one shows the poet Allen Ginsberg in the costume of Uncle Sam. This one is a crude vulgarization of a subtle topological paradox by the Dutch printmaker M. G. Escher. This one shows a nude young couple making love in the Pacific surf. Eight to ten years ago, hundreds of thousands of young people decorated their rooms with such posters. Selig, although he was not exactly young even then, did the same. He often has followed current fads and modes in an attempt to affiliate himself more firmly with the structures of contemporary existence. I suppose these posters are quite valuable now; he takes them with him from one cheap rooming house to the next.