Read an Excerpt
Part One
1946–1952
“The new guy should come, too,” Jacks had said in his loud voice, flat as a hand clap, his barrel chest steeped and brimming with all his endless simplicity. Of course the plan had been there all along, but in a way it was Jacks who set the whole thing in motion, because Jacks had said Kunstler should come to the dance hall, and Kunstler had come. It was Jacks, too, who introduced Kunstler to the girl, the taxi dancer, the one called Inez Clay.
“I danced with her,” Jacks said, pointing out one girl after another as they swung by with their clients. “And her. And her, I danced with her lots.”
“That’s a lot of dimes, Jacks. It’s like you’ve danced with every girl in Trenton. No wonder you roll your own.” Kunstler’s little metallic rasp of a voice was hard to make out over the music, so Jacks had to bend to hear him ask, “What about that one?”
“Oh, that girl? Yeah, I danced with her. The guys say she’s got trouble. Kind of like a dipso, they said.”
Kunstler lit a cigarette and said, “Like a thing is a thing.”
“What?”
“Like a thing is a thing. Someone like a thief is a thief. Someone like a cutup is a cutup. And somebody like a dipso is definitely a dipso. Like just is, there’s no difference.”
“Yeah, well, she don’t go bitching around or anything, I don’t think. She just drinks a bit is all.” He lowered his voice and said, “Actually the other girls sometimes say that she’s kiki, because they figure maybe she don’t like men on account of she doesn’t like it when the guys get too, well . . . touchy. You know.”
“Oh, touchy. Sure, I know,” said Kunstler, who instead didn’t touch her, or at least not at first, except to shake her hand when Jacks introduced them, calling her “Miss Clay,” and later to put a hand on a place high on her back when they danced. Instead he bought her drinks and gave her tickets, which she would rip, turning away to tuck half in the top of her stocking, passing the other half seemingly without looking to a ticket-taker who simply appeared and vanished so quickly again into the crowd that he was little more ever than a reaching hand and a gesture, as if the beaverboard walls with their red-white-and-blue bunting had arms. Then during the band’s breaks Kunstler bought her a fresh drink every time and while she drank it they talked—about what, the others couldn’t imagine, but she laughed a lot, and when she danced with other clients it seemed that she and Abe Kunstler still found each other’s eyes.
The girl was small: that’s what caught Kunstler’s attention. He wouldn’t dance with a tall woman, wouldn’t be the little guy with his face buried in some bosom to be laughed at, so the sight of her, petite but not boyish, filling her rayon dress, was a relief. He watched her smile at a factory man still in his cheap war-time woolens and then draw him to the crowded floor, let him stand too close and reach gradually down her back. He also noted the almost invisible retreat by which she baffled his hands when the song was done, no refusal but an evaporation that was also a barrier. She was watery, effortlessly variable, not to be grabbed with fingers. Their first time on the dance floor Kunstler had offered her his right hand and she laughed. He pulled it away.
“Don’t be angry,” she said.
He nodded. “Mind if we stand—” he started, and she waited and then nodded and whispered, “Away from your friends? Sure.” She led him a little way across the hall.
“Oh, fine,” he said. “I won’t remember that.”
“Don’t worry, the names don’t mean anything, it’s what you do that matters. You’ll get it, it’s no big deal. This one’s not too fast, it will be easy,” she said as they started to move away towards the floor. Even then Kunstler was aware how good they looked together, that her softness suited his sharp bones. The girl Inez said, “A few more kisses.”
Abe pulled his head back and said, “Sorry, what?”
“The song. ‘A Few More Kisses.’ I like it. Don’t you like it?”
“Sure,” he said, “it’s swell,” but he was concentrating hard on the raised left arm and his right hand at her back, the mirror image, the inverted world, and then they were done, and when her body was gone he was left with a sense he couldn’t quite name.
At the end of the night Kunstler waited, ready to help the girl when she stumbled a little drunkenly on the stairs outside the entrance. She asked if he would stop with her in a bar. “The booze at the hall is watered, you know. And I want to listen to some real music. That band’s terrible. Everything in that place is terrible. Don’t you just love music? I mean real music, good music. Not that stuff they play there.” He bought her a gin and Italian, and watched her carry the short brimming glass cautiously to a booth, where she sat without her shoes and sculpting her arches with both hands, saying, “You’re never off the clock in those dumps. If you want to even think, you’d better goddamn hop it. They run you sore. You know when we haven’t got a fellow we’re supposed to dance with each other? Like I’d spend a minute longer with one of those girls than I have to.” They sat quietly for a minute, Kunstler neither moving nor speaking, just watching her through the bar darkness with his cast-iron expression. Inez finally said, “Hey, I noticed you work with mostly a lot of Micks. Are you a Catholic?”
“What, me? Oh, hell, I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not what I am any more, whatever it is.”
“Not a church person, you mean? Me neither.” She nodded at that and took a drink before nodding again as if her head rested on the ocean, and said, “I’m Episcopalian. I guess I mean that my mother was.”
Then she spoke almost unstoppably, a surge of memories about foster homes where she experienced some things too soon and in overabundance and others not enough. The girl had been fifteen when she accepted her first ticket to dance with a boyish enlisted man at one of the halls near Mountain Home. Both of them had been careful and shy. Back then she drank only Coke and bitters, but of course it was a dance hall, and really they sold two things: the one was illusion, the make-believe of intimacy and gaiety and carelessness. The other was alcohol, which dressed the stage where the illusion could perform. “The pop hurt my stomach after a while,” she told him. “Can you believe it, that I had my first cocktail for my health? I always crossed my ankles back then, too. Well, hey, that’s life. I mean, what are you going to do?
It was in Mountain Home that she met the young Brylcreemed piano player she had followed east. “He was called Boat,” the girl said, “on account of he had huge feet, really big. I mean it. He could hardly find anything to fit them. This drummer once said Boat was wrong, he could buy any old shoes and it didn’t matter what size, just to wear the box they come in. Isn’t that funny?” she asked without laughing. She also described the girl singer they had met at a show in the taxi hall at Millville, a girl whose stockings weren’t full of blisters, a girl Boat finally left with, taking with him all the money from the motel room, including all the hard-won nickels that were her fifty percent share of the dimes men paid to dance. “It was mine as much as his, you know. I had to start again, and I’ll tell you, it’s not easy to save up money at five cents a dance. Someone saw them get in a cab, that’s all. That’s how I knew they were gone.” She looked up at Kunstler, and leaning against him, asked, “Do you think it’s because I like spooning more than I like the other stuff? It’s not that I don’t want to be more like that, more like what it was he hoped for. More what I suppose all men hope for? But things are what they are, I guess. Ever have too much ice cream when you were a kid? A man who was friends with my mother, it was like that with him. The worst part was he made me call him Uncle Andrew.”
When at last she relaxed into her gin haze and was quiet Kunstler led her gently to his rooming house, where he checked that the landlord wasn’t awake to see him taking her up the stairs.
*
Jacks had said to them, “The new guy should come, too,” and at just that moment everyone, even the ones who might have wanted to argue with him, realized Kunstler was standing right there, the first dressed as usual, silent but at hand, one eye closed against the smoke of his cigarette. Loitering, they called it. He stood with his tie knotted tight, one shoulder against his locker door, and nodded his bony face at them as if accepting a compliment, perhaps unaware that they, still open collared or in their undershirts and with their boots next to them on the benches and their socks in their fists, would later agree among themselves that it had been the little man’s idea in the first place. “The mouth may be all the way up there where Jacks keeps his head,” said Blackie, “but the brain. That’s lots closer to the ground, if you know what I mean.”
“You’re just angry about how he stumps your stupid pranks,” Ahern said, and it was true that Kunstler had frustrated them with his imperviousness. Olive pits and sandwich ends and chicken bones and other detritus from their various lunches left in his coverall pockets had been tossed aside so casually you might have thought he generally kept that kind of thing there himself. Blackie and two of the other die men had been especially furious at Kunstler for getting in the way of some practical jokes they played on Jacks, who was mocked for being cheap because he still rolled his own—although of course they knew without having to ask that he didn’t make much being only the janitor—and for having not been sent farther than North Carolina during the war, as if he had asked for the posting, or indeed had ever asked in all his life for practically anything.
And yet it wasn’t what Kunstler did but the way he had done it that left Blackie so sore. Everything with him went too far, somehow, and without ever being in any way a threat, still it was sinister, like a superstition you know is foolish but frightens you anyway: black cats or thirteen to dinner, an umbrella opened indoors. The first time had been the strangest, when around New Year Blackie, Simmons, and Breen had come back from a weekend skiing, still breathless and hectic, talking and joking, calling to one another over the rhythmic cry of the wire unspooling from coil to capstan to coil. At the lunch hour they had quieted suddenly to watch Jacks walk to the lockers and rummage in his jacket for cigarette papers. He thought to look before he started rolling only because of how they stood—clustered, alert—and having tumbled to them he held his paper up to the blunt electric light and saw someone had drawn a long and knotted penis, which he would then have put in his mouth.
“How do you like it?” one of them asked him. “Balls first or tip first?”
“Remember you have to lick it to make it sticky,” said Blackie.
Jacks crumpled the thin strip into his coverall pocket straight away, nodding around with a half smile and saying, “Okay, okay,” in his flush monotone. He pulled out another paper—only that, too, was part of the gag, because he had almost shaken out his tobacco before he noticed it was the same. In fact, as he peeled away one after another he found all the papers were ruined: they had drawn the same thing on every one and placed them carefully back in the box. Blackie and the others laughed out loud now. “That took us all weekend,” Breen said. “You should appreciate the hard work.” The emphasized word hard made them laugh again.
“How am I going to smoke?”
“You’re just going to have to chew that over.”
“Sorry, Jackson. I think we’re all out.”
It was then that Kunstler had appeared suddenly from his leaning place against the wall, and taking the little cardboard envelope from Jacks stood for a moment looking at it, flipping through the papers with all the lack of interest or hurry of someone looking through a book in a foreign language. “That’s funny,” the little man said in his high, croaking metal wheeze, a voice that always sounded as if it were being cranked out on a rusty machine. Then, still holding the papers, he said with the same absolutely humorless manner, the same patina of calm, “Hey, here’s a funny one for you. These three guys, they go skiing, but they’re just factory slobs, like us, no money. So they share a room, the three of them. Then there’s just the one bed, but that’s no problem, they can share that, too. Fine. And in the morning, the one on the left says, ‘It’s crazy, I dreamed some guy was whacking me off,’ and the guy on the right says, ‘Hey, I had the same dream.’ ” While Kunstler spoke he let the papers drop snow-like to the floor and offered Jacks a pre-rolled from his coverall pocket. He went on, Jacks leaning down expectantly, the others already gathering their anger. “So the guy in the middle, he says, ‘You two are nuts. I just dreamed I was skiing.’ ” Unsmiling, he lit a match against the wall, barely raising it to Jacks’ dipped cigarette.
“Jesus, that crazy bastard,” Blackie had said when it became clear Kunstler was going to let the thing burn right down to his fingernail. Jacks had been laughing too hard; he hadn’t noticed.
“Hey, tell us another one,” said Jacks, his cigarette still unlit in his hand.
“Maybe later,” Kunstler said. He dropped the burnt-out match and walked away.
