Three Balconies Page 4

  “Padre,” he shouted to Campesano, who was still praying in the technical section, “my book’s on the shelf.”

  He put his hands over his eyes to cover the embarrassing tears, but then he realized he was with a man of God; it was all right to cry in front of him.

  “Let’s see,” said the padre.

  Kahn took down the copy. “This is really something,” he said, genuinely fighting for breath, “I didn’t even know there were any copies in print. And to find it in a prison.”

  He opened the book. It was in fairly good condition – far from dog-eared – but it had been taken out and stamped at least thirty times. That meant it had been read by thirty prisoners, not to mention their cellmates who might have taken a peek at it, too. The book was about his father, cheated out of his life’s savings by unscrupulous business partners in the shoulder pad business. What could the prisoners have possibly gotten out of such a book? But at least thirty of them now knew the kind of man his father was – decent, honorable, although a little too trusting. This made him cry again.

  “Look,” he said, turning arbitrarily to a page and pointing to the word ‘Negro’. (Mostly he was trying to keep himself from crying.) “I wrote it eighteen years ago, before everybody said ‘black’.”

  “Isn’t that something,” said the padre. “Let me tell the Warden.”

  He buzzed the Warden on the intercom. “Hey, Hollis,” he said. “Come on down. Our visitor’s found a book he wrote on the shelf. I told him, of course, it should be in the porno section.”

  Kahn understood that the padre was trying to lighten things up, but he didn’t care for the joke. He was too moved.

  The Warden ran in, out of breath, as if there were a prison emergency. Kahn showed him the book.

  “That’s wonderful,” said the official. “What’s it about?”

  Kahn told him it was a thinly autobiographical novel that focused on his father’s losses in the shoulder pad business. “But it has other dimensions, too,” he added.

  “I’m delighted we had it here,” said the Warden, beaming proudly, as if an ex-inmate had turned up with a responsible job.

  “Yeah,” said the padre, “and just think, it never even occurred to him that we might have switched it in here just before he showed up.”

  The Warden and the padre laughed and Kahn joined in with them, although he wasn’t too crazy about that joke either.

  It was getting late. Kahn replaced the book on the shelf, tenderly, as if he were ending a visit to an inmate. “Maybe I’ll get back to writing,” he said.

  On the steps of the Library, Kahn asked the Warden if there was anything in the prison he had missed.

  “We could visit Ureah,” said the Warden, “the women’s unit.”

  “What’s it like over there?”

  “Nicer-looking,” said the Warden. “Lots of pastels.”

  Then, stroking his heavy chin, he said: “Holly Kitenzo’s bringing a suit against us for not allowing her to wear her hair extremely short. You could see her.”

  “What’s she in for?”

  “Bank robbery,” said the Warden. “Also aggravated assault. She left four dead in Arkansas. Here’s her petition.”

  He handed Kahn a sheet of paper with tiny printing on it and diagrams. It looked like the floor plan of a bank for a planned robbery. He may have been shirking his responsibilities, but suddenly Kahn had no heart to visit Ureah. An older man and a friend had once suggested to him that sometimes people had to protect themselves from the world’s horrors. Here was his chance to start. The day had been exhausting. Finding the book about his beloved father had been an overwhelming experience. As far as he was concerned, it was enough that the Warden had told him about Kitenzo so that he didn’t find out about it on CNN.

  “I think I’ll pass,” said Kahn. “But you know what I would like?”

  “What’s that?” asked the Warden.

  “A plate of your vegetables.”

  “Why didn’t you say so,” said the Warden. “I’ll have them warmed up.”

  “It just occurred to me,” said Kahn.

  “Padre,” said the Warden, “get Mr. Kahn a container of our vegetables.”

  “Coming right up,” said the padre.

  Kahn hadn’t meant to inconvenience the man of God, but before he could protest, the padre had whisked himself off to the dining room. Kahn and the Warden stood in silence on the prison steps. Off in the distance, some petrochemical works were lighting up, giving the prison grounds a bejeweled look.

  The padre came out with a container of cooked vegetables and handed them to Kahn.

  “I hope they travel well,” said the padre.

  “About as good as I will,” said Kahn, not quite sure what he meant.

  “Come back and visit us,” said the Warden, shaking Kahn’s hand. “Any time.”

  “I’d like that,” said Kahn, feeling an urge to pinch the man’s friendly neck.

  He said goodbye to the padre, then watched the two prison officials enter the facility. Alone in the night, Kahn took a last look at the prison and sneaked a taste of the hot vegetables; they’d gone heavy on the okra which was every bit as good as he’d imagined. The prison lights blinked on. Kahn caught an outline of two men playing ping-pong. He pictured others in the cellblocks, reading books from the excellent library, writing letters home, playing comradely games of cards and watching TV on the wonderfully clear set he’d spotted in the day room. They were probably exchanging bawdy stories, too. Who knows, possibly a cart had been wheeled through, carrying still more vegetables, ones that were left over from lunch – cold, but still delicious. He thought of his new friends, the padre, the ranch hand, the sleepy Mexican, even the man with the cut-marks who probably wasn’t that terrible once you got to know him. More than ever, he was convinced that he could get along very nicely if he was ever thrown into a prison like this.

  Then he pictured his gloomy house in the suburbs. Kahn was the only single on the street. Once in awhile, he dropped into a bar nearby that attracted divorcees, most of them too flashy for his taste. Now and then, he watched a movie in an ancient theatre down the street, one of the few customers. Jolson had once played there, but this meant nothing to Kahn. Most nights he worked in his attic, looking out on darkness.

  He hated to leave the prison and for a moment considered knocking on the prison door and asking the Warden for another quick tour, in case he had overlooked some details. But that was ridiculous. It was late. He had a deadline. What if he missed his plane! Rummaging around for his car keys, his fingers touched a joint from an old forgotten party. At first he was terrified. After all, he was still on prison grounds. The state was famous for having the toughest laws on dope in the country, and this is where they put the dopers. But then hands other than his own seemed to pull the forbidden joint out of his pocket and light it up. Unmistakably, though, it was Alexander Kahn himself who took a puff and held it flamboyantly aloft in the moonlight. At a nearby guard-post, a dog flared its nostrils, then pricked up its ears. Two others did the same. Kahn watched them start tentatively in his direction, then gather speed and flash swiftly through the night. Guards followed them as the prison lights came up white-hot and a voice on the bullhorn said: “Stay where you are.” Scared out of his wits, and at the same time shivering with anticipation, Kahn prepared to embrace his new freedom.

  “I Don’t Want Her, You Can Have Her . . .”

  THE MAN AND WOMAN sat opposite one another in the parlor of a West Village brownstone. The room had a cozy disorganized look to it, as if it had been shared by a devoted and dotty couple for the past thirty or forty years – which it had not. The man, in his fifties and not unattractive, had not shaved for several days. His “look” was not, in this case, a fashion statement. The woman, twenty years his junior, had close-cropped hair and wore a tailored suit.

  The man took a deep breath as if he were about to plunge into cold water.

  “She’s become fat.”


  “Fat,” the woman said cheerfully, repeating the key word, as if to hold it up to the light for inspection. He had some familiarity with this therapeutic technique, although this was the first time it had been directed at him (used against him?) personally.

  “I don’t mean gross,” he said, retreating a bit. “Although I did catch her doing a fat walk the other day, waddling if you must know, as if she were preparing to go all out and really pork up. And there is something about the way she’s begun to guard her food, her pasta dishes, to be precise – leaning forward and encircling the plate with her arms and looking about on all sides as if someone were going to snatch it away. Like fucking Cro Magnon man is the appearance of it. And she’ll snap at me if I so much as touch one of her french fries, pretending to be playful, although, trust me, that is far from the case.

  “Actually,” he said, “I’m talking about forty or fifty pounds.

  “Sixty max,” he added.

  He allowed for a pause here – in the event she wanted to move in with a comment. He was not disappointed when she chose to let him go on.

  “You have to understand,” he said, “she had a beautiful body when we met – lovely full breasts, a small waist, athletic legs – schoolyard legs is the way I thought of them. Every boy’s dream she was, if you’ll permit me.”

  “I’ll permit you,” she said, and of course they could have done ten minutes on the word “permit” but they both decided to push on.

  “My own daughter,” he said, “who was naturally resistant to my remarrying, said she could see why I would want to sleep with her. ‘Roll around’ with her is the way she put it.

  “There was more to it, of course,” he continued, not waiting for a response this time. “Her laugh, a chuckle, really . . . eyes at the same time both trusting and mischievous . . . very difficult to pull off. We shared the same taste in books, although lately she’s gone off in another direction . . . reads novels about large Irish families. Large dysfunctional Irish families . . . I’m sure it’s just a phase.... Much more important is that in time I began to feel she was the most compassionate person I’d ever known. And good Christ, she felt so good in bed.”

  “And now?”

  “And now,” he repeated, throwing the technique right back at her to gain a little time, since the next part was going to be tricky. He had never had a female therapist before and did not want to go at the sex business too hard. Nor was there any point in being overly decorous. Pussy-footing around. (And there was a phrase for you.)

  “She still feels good. After all, it is her, for Christ’s sakes. And I do love her.”

  He began to cry at that point, not a great big blubbering affair, but he was crying all right, although he would have bet a great deal of money against his falling apart in such a manner. Certainly not during a first session.

  “Do you want a tissue?” she asked.

  “No, no, that’s fine,” he said, brushing at the tears with his shirt sleeve.

  “If I had to describe the sex,” he said, regrouping – and accepting the tissue after all, “I’d call it comfortable. Cozy, if you wish.

  “And I’m sure you’ll agree there’s a lot worse,” he added, picking up some snappishness in his tone.

  “I do agree,” she said, taking the traditional – and much celebrated – non-committal stance.

  “I can assure you,” he continued, though she had not asked for assurance, “I’ve never humiliated her, never come out and said ‘Good God, you’re huge or hummed a chorus of ‘She’s too fat for me.’ Gone by the textbook I have, leading by example, keeping my own weight down, or at least attempting to. I may have gotten off a remark here and there about a girlfriend of hers who’s remained trim and fit – but nothing cruel.

  “Still, I must have indicated to her one Sunday night – that’s the time we set aside to – as they say – do it . . . that the weight bothered me. Perhaps it was the way I put my arms around her waist – a bit dramatically – as if to suggest that it took some effort to get all the way around her. Or it might have been the expression on my face when she undressed – I’m not much of a poker player. In any case, she seemed to get the idea and suggested I flip her around, close my eyes and think of the photo affixed to her college I.D. card – the one I had always found arousing. That was her proposal, and that’s what we do, once a week, me focusing on the photo on her college I.D. card, making love . . . and here I suppose I have to use the phrase ‘doggie-style.’” “I won’t tell a soul,” she said, showing a mischievous side of her own.

  “I do love to kiss her. I get lost when I kiss her,” he went on, getting lost as he said this. “There isn’t anyone else I’d rather kiss.”

  “Anyone else,” she said, and this time the repetition was irritating, taking him, as it did, to a place he didn’t particularly want to go.

  “There is someone else,” he said. “A Russian woman of all people. Highly unlikely choice for me, if indeed it was a choice on my part. Attractive, slender, of course . . . quite young. She’d read something of mine in translation . . . took me to dinner, made it clear she’s available . . . lives alone, writes a little pornography . . . All of this attention from her was flattering . . . and yet I’ve held back. It seems too exhausting to have an affair. And of course there was one troubling aspect to it.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “After our dinner, my new friend asked if it was customary to leave a tip.”

  “Well. . . . coming from Russia . . .”

  “I realize that . . . different culture . . . It’s all very reasonable . . . Except that she pronounced the word ‘teep.’ Call it xenophobic if you like, but I could never have an affair with someone who says ‘teep.’ By the time she got it right, I’d be off in another direction.

  “Besides,” he said, almost as an afterthought, “what if my wife found out? . . . .”

  “What if she did?”

  “That’s my fear, you see. That she would immediately lose fifty pounds and run off with one of those befuddled third World diplomats that she counsels at the UN.”

  “And then?”

  “And then?” he said, brought up short for the moment. “And then I wouldn’t have her.”

  She glanced at the clock. He did as well and saw that the session was drawing to a close.

  “Look,” he said, rushing now to meet the deadline, “I can get through very nicely. It’s pleasant enough in bed. I don’t claim to have any ferocious drive these days. It’s not as if I’m lusting after skinny blondes in garter belts. She’s an awfully good friend and tremendously loyal. I know, I know, it sounds like I’m describing a dog. But she’s a remarkable person. How many men have that? What I’m getting at is that this is not a sad story.”

  “What is it that you want?”

  “I want my wife back,” he said, surprised at the ferocity of his response. “I didn’t bargain for mumus and waddling and expansion pants and having to cringe when some lard-assed tub of an individual comes hoving into view at a screening – blimping into view – and I’m forced to introduce her as my wife.”

  The woman absorbed this last as if it were a blow and then got up from her chair.

  “I don’t think I can go on like this,” she said.

  “You felt confident that you could.”

  “I was wrong. Clearly, it’s impossible to treat someone . . .”

  “When there’s a dual connection,” he said, finishing the thought. “I know.”

  They looked at each other in silence. He was the first to speak.

  “What do we do?”

  “Go on, I guess. We do love each other.”

  “We do,” he said, putting his arms around her, the bulk of her and pressing her to him with all his strength. “Oh God, do we ever.”

  Fit As a Fiddle

  IT WAS A DARK TIME FOR DUGAN. Though he was hale, if not hearty, at sixty-two, his friends were dropping like flies. First to go had been O’Shea who had found the strains of a divorce to
be unbearable and waded into a pond in Patchogue, never again to surface. Next came Taggert, a trumpet player who had been hospitalized with frail lungs, then quickly released when he set a record for blowing up pulmonary balloons. Yet soon after, he expired all the same – in a commercial hotel, surrounded by weeping jazz musicians. No sooner had Dugan recovered from this loss than he received word that Lieberman, his long-time editor, had keeled over at his desk, as if he had grown weary of reading introspective first novels. Lieberman had been Dugan’s age, almost to the day, and had appeared to be strong as an ox. Brilliant at shoring up defective manuscripts, he had imposed a clever structure on Dugan’s complex study of nineteenth-century Balkan cabals. The loss was a grievous one to Dugan who could not help but think – it’s getting closer.