Chapter VI: Part 6

The girl flicked on a victrola, putting a finger to her lips, and said, "I'm just a tattered tenant here." She closed her eyes and swayed to the music as though it were a treatment; her body lagged a trifle behind the beat, in the slow-motion style of the feebleminded children she watched each day. Holding out her arms to the blond boy, she said, "Step inside this delightful sound." The blond boy came over, pinched her skirt, and said, "Check your oil." Then he pointed to the Greek boy, who sat staring out at the stars, rubbing his hands as though washing them in a sink. "Dance with George," said the blond boy. "Hey, George, dance with the broad." The Greek boy, his back to the others, a lawyer deciding a case, said, "I don't like dancing. I came out with you to do some jazzing."

The tall boy suddenly grabbed the Greek's wheelchair and pushed it out the door, saying, "I got an idea." Inside the beauty parlor room, he picked up a cigarette holder, put on a hairnet, and sat beneath a hair dryer. "Hey, look at me," he hollered back to Stern and the girl. "I'm an old broad."

The girl closed the door and said, "Boredom sets in swiftly." Still swaying to the music, she asked Stern, "What is your work?" Thrilled by her sudden interest and loving the way she had asked the question, Stern said, "Product labels. There's some writing to it, only not literary." Dancing with closed eyes and lagging behind the beat, she said, "Someday I, too, shall write a volume. I shall include the sweetness and bile of my life." She stopped dancing now and said, "One of the spooks at the hardware store asked me to do some modeling. Bearded chap. Does figure work mean you work in the altogether, or does one get to keep a doodad on?"

"I don't get into that in my work," said Stern. "I don't like the sound of what you said, though. I have some friends who are legitimate photographers."

She changed the record to a fox-trot now and, taking off her skirt, said, "How would I look adorning magazines?"

Stern stopped breathing, and it suddenly came home to him that they were only a mile or so from the Grove Rest Home and that he was supposed to be undergoing treatment. He was certain that he would be caught, and he tried to imagine what untold horrors would await him if he were brought before the Home committee. At the very least they would throw him out, marking his records so that he would be banned from other rest homes when, at some later date, new illnesses came on. Then he imagined one gentile on the committee smiling thinly and saying, "No, no, let's let him stay," and then seeing to it that he was given a daily allotment of tarnished pills so that his stomach sprouted an entire forest of ulcers.

She put her hand on her hips in a terrible thirties pose and then took off her sweater, saying, "Oh yes, the bosom culture; I'd forgotten." Her breasts poured forward, capped by slanting, evil, Puerto Rican nipples, and Stern had a sudden feeling that his wife, at that very moment, sad-eyed and chattering with need, was hoisting her own sweater above her head in the rear seat of a limousine, that there was a strange sexual balance wheel at work, and that for every indiscretion of Stern's his wife would commit one too, at best only seconds later.

Like a discharged mortar shell, the tall, blond boy, a salivated look of rage on his face, charged into the room now and said, "Oh, you lookin' at my girl's nips, eh?" He shoved Stern against the wall and shot his fist at Stern's neck, stopping once again at the final instant and saying "Fwot" instead of landing the blow. Then he became convulsed with laughter, doubling up on the bed and howling, "I got you again." The boy stood up then and kissed the girl's nipples with loud, smacking sounds and said to the Greek, "Good set, eh?" Stern, feeling somehow that the girl's breasts were going to get hurt, walked over to her and said, "We were discussing something and she was demonstrating it." The tall boy said softly, "Oh, that's all right. I just like to diddle her boobs a little. George and me will take ten outside and kid around with those dryers." Then, with increasing kindness, he said, "You know the way you say things? Like what you just said? You were _discussing_ something. That's nice. The way you have of saying all the thoughts in your head."

Stern noticed now for the first time that the boy's T-shirt had holes in it, and he felt very sorry for possibly having taken something away from him. What if his veins acted up and he had to spend six months in a room, unable to swing from trees and make believe he was going to hit Stern in the ulcer?

"We can all stay in here and play around," said Stern, but the blond boy walked out, saying, "That's all right, Mr. Stern, sir." To the boy in the wheelchair, Stern said, "You can stick around," but the Greek youth, rubbing his hands, said, "No, I don't feel like it tonight. You know, some nights you're just not in the mood for jazzing." He wheeled himself out of the room, closing the door behind him, and the girl put her arms around Stern's neck and said, "Sweet riddance. Now, my knighted author, will you be with me on the highest of all levels?"

Minutes previous, when she had taken off her clothes, Stern had planned merely to stare at her and fix her in his memory. Perhaps he would tap her behind and feel her breasts in the style of the other boys and then race back across the streets to the Grove Rest Home. It seemed to him that somehow if he did more, the Home would definitely hear of it, his treatment would be disrupted at an early stage, and he would be doomed to walk the streets forever with a permanent ulcer blooming between his ribs. And, of course, if he were to go further, within minutes his own wife, skirt gaping and great eyes confident, would sink back comfortably on the rear cushions of some strange convertible.

He waited for an outraged knock at the door, the clatter of Lennie's machine-shop legs, but nothing came and he fitted his hands over the girl's nylon-covered buttocks, thinking that he had never held a Puerto Rican behind before and that maybe it _was_ a little different. She took his ear between her chipped white teeth, as though she were an animal pawing meat, and said, "Wondrous author of mine, explore forbidden avenues with deponent thine."

She guided him to the bed, did a dipping thing to make herself nude, and said, "Honest, do you think I'm sensitive?"

"Yes," said Stern, who loved the things she said.

She pulled him to her and said, "Then thrill my secret fibers." She put a contraceptive on him and said, "Now, honey, don't spoil it. Really, let's do a good one." It bothered Stern that she had the contraceptive on hand, but he liked the way she managed it, and the idea of her having one ready suddenly threw him into a frenzy. After a moment, she whispered, "We are as pages in a book of sonnets. Really give it to me." He said, "All right," and after a few seconds she rose and said, a little irritatedly, "Oh, you thrilled me, all right. You really thrilled me." She got into her clothes, and then the irritation passed, and she perched on the bed beside him and said, "Such loveliness I have never known." Her bare brown Puerto Rican knees excited Stern and he wanted her again. He had loved the things she whispered to him and the sting of her teeth pulling on his flesh like meat. "Tell me of your literary prowess," she said.

The door opened and the blond boy came in and said, "We're tired of sitting around out there."

Stern looked out in the corridor and saw the Greek boy's wheelchair against the window. He went outside to him and found the boy crying. "My leg is gone," he said. "I ain't got two fucking legs any more." Stern took the boy's head against his waist and rubbed his neck, trying to think of something to tell him. But there was nothing. What could he say? That the leg would grow back again? "Some people have things even worse than legs in their stomachs," he said finally. He wheeled the boy inside the room, where the girl sat perched on the bed. The tall, blond boy picked up an extra-long broomstick handle and said, "Hey, George, let's give her a ride." He quickly slid the broomstick between the girl's legs, and the boy in the wheelchair, getting the idea, dried his eyes, wheeled close, and caught the other end, so that they had her straddling the stick as though she were on a fence. They began to lift her up and down on the broomstick, the two of them howling at the ceiling, while the girl shouted, "Lemme off, you bastards." Stern shouted, "You'll hurt her down there," but she looked so awkward, he stopped loving her immediately. When she cursed at them, Stern looked at her and said, "I can't do anything."

"Hey, Mr. Stern, keep her up there," said the blond boy, and Stern took the Greek boy's end and tossed her up and down a few times, saying, "I'm going to do this a little, too."

They finally let her down, and for an instant, straightening her skirt, she smoothed her hair and pretended nothing had happened. "Let me tell you further of my book," she said to Stern. But, after seeing her on the pole, the thought of her terrible Puerto Rican writing disgusted him and he said, "No literary stuff now."

She bent over then, holding her crotch, and said, "Ooh, you really hurt me down there, you cruddy bastards." Stern felt good that she had addressed all three of them, not excluding him, and it thrilled him to be flying out of her apartment with his new friends, all three howling and smacking each other with laughter at the pole episode. He wanted to be with them, not with her. He needed buddies, not a terrible Puerto Rican girl. He needed close friends to stand around a piano with and sing the Whiffenpoof song, arms around each other, perhaps before shipping out somewhere to war. If his dad got sick, he needed friends to stand in hospital corridors with him and grip his arm. He needed guys to stand back to back with him in bars and take on drunks. These were tattered, broken boys, one in a wheelchair, but they were buddies. They skidded across the lawn, wildly recalling the night's events.

The blond boy: "You see me kick that guy's ass? Pow, pow, pow!"

The Greek: "We almost ran that broomstick up the broad's kazoo, man."

Stern: "Did you see me hold that strong little guy at the bar?"

They split up at the main gate, each stealing back to his room separately. "Tomorrow night, maybe we do some real jazzing," said the boy in the wheelchair as they parted.

Exhilarated as he slipped past Lennie's darkened office, Stern, approaching his room, felt his stomach and was surprised to find the tapestry still prickling raw against it. Perhaps excitement is not good for it, he thought--even good excitement. But it did not really bother him, and it occurred to him for the first time that if necessary, by God, he would live with the damned thing. He opened his door now and saw the half man, bathrobe flown apart, toothache towel around his jaw, sitting on Stern's bed. The sleeping actor's foot stirred momentarily, tapping the edge of the bed in time to some forgotten vaudeville turn. Stern wheeled around in a panic, wanting to flee the room until the half man was out of there and his bed was scrubbed. He went out into the hall, but the half man chased and caught him, gripping Stern's wrist in a death vise. "Question," he radio-croaked in the dark hall.

"What?" asked Stern, his eyes closed so he would not see the half man, not daring to inhale lest he smell his halves.

"You Jewish?" the man asked, croaking so close his mouth worked against Stern's ear.

"Yes," said Stern, shutting his eyes until they hurt.

"Me, too," croaked the man, wheeling Stern around so that he had to face him. "I'm Jewish, too."

It did not thrill Stern to hear this. It was no great revelation, and it failed to touch him, just as the man's terrible violin playing had not moved him either. He said, "OK," and freed his wrist, but as he walked away a crumbling chill seemed to invade him, starting between his shoulder blades and pouring through all of him. He turned and kissed the man and hugged him and put his nose up against the man's toothache towel, and then, perhaps using some of the courage he had amassed that evening, embraced the man's bad side, too.

* * * * *

He had counted on firm handshakes and hearty good-byes, exchanged phone numbers, pledges to continue friendships, and deep sincere looks in the eye, but on the morning of his departure he found that the people at Grove hung away from him. He was sitting on the porch with them, after leading the dumb march back from breakfast with Rooney in his arms, and he said to Rooney, "I'm all better and I'm going home today."

Rooney, who had been clinging to a pole and making waspish comments about the wealth of horse owners, turned to Stern and said, "You didn't say anything about that."

The old actor overheard Stern and said, "What did you come up for, if you were only staying such a little time? That's really country, boy, really country."

It was as though by getting healthy he had violated a rotted, fading charter of theirs and let them down. He had come into their sick club under false pretenses, enjoying the decayed rituals, and all the while his body wasn't ruined at all. He was secretly healthy, masquerading as a shattered man so that he could milk the benefits of their crumbling society. And now he felt bad about not being torn up as they were.

"I didn't know you weren't that sick," said Feldner in his bathrobe. "I had what you got, and I needed the warm of a stew in me every day for two years."

"I may have to come right back," said Stern, trying to make the man in the bathrobe feel better.

He went over to the charged-up blond boy, who was leaning on the young Greek's wheelchair, and said, "Maybe you can take a run by my place when you get sprung."

But the camaraderie of the wild evening was gone. "You weren't even in here much," said the blond boy, and the Greek youth said, "Yeah, what'd you come up here--to fool around?"

Only Lennie was consistent that morning. He had taken Stern's baggage out of the room himself, and when Stern tried to help him, he said, "No infractions on last days. There are patients who rupture before check-out, and legal suits come about. Patients to the right as we take baggage downstairs." At the bottom of the steps, he loaded Stern's valises onto the baggage rack and walked intricately into his office. "Final pill," he said to Stern, getting one ready in a little cup. When the Negro handed him the pill cup, Stern stuck a folded-up five-dollar bill in the pocket of the intern's jacket. His mother had always stuck bills in the pockets of busboys and waiters and, after each insertion, had said, "I never missed that kind of money. You should see the respect I got for it." Lennie took the bill out of his jacket, examined it, and put it back in his pocket. He started to turn around, but then he changed his mind and asked Stern, "Anyone around?" Stern said everyone was out on the porch, and the Negro said, "Come on in here then," beckoning Stern into the forbidden office. "Have a seat," said Lennie, locking them both in. He sat down himself, releasing gears and switches, and then produced a loose-leaf notebook. He thumbed through it, stopped at a page, and said, "The old actor guy. Guy you roomin' with. He go around saying he got the weakness. He ain't coming out of here. They been trying to get him ready for another operation, but he too weak." He flipped the page and said, "Girl check in here two days ago," referring to a young and pretty blond girl who had kept to herself. "She says she restin'. Well, she got something in her from intercoursin' with a man too big for her. Who else you want to know?"

"None of the others right now," said Stern, wanting to leave the room but afraid to offend the Negro.

"That's all right," said Lennie, turning to another page. "Rooney, the guy you carryin'. Bones softening up; nothing they can do on him. He be here for the duration." He flipped again. "Feldner, the Jew fella. He hit Casino. He gettin' out but ain't got no more'n a year." Without referring to the book, he said, "The half guy you see stalkin' around. He surprisin' everybody. He gawn be around when they all through."

The Negro ran through the other patients, while Stern made himself small in his chair and tried to block out all sound. After the last patient, Stern found himself putting another bill in the Negro's pocket, as though he hadn't realized what he was getting and saw now that he had underpaid.

A sweet and choirlike glow came over the Negro's face as he showed Stern out of the office and began to push the baggage cart. All the way to the administration building he blurted out secrets of the Home. "Nobody know it, but they get tranquilizer every day," he said. "Guy gonna die, we shift him to Room 12 so we can whip him out of there when he go and not shake up no one."

And after each batch of secrets, Stern compulsively stuffed another bill in the Negro's jacket, wanting him to stop and tell no others, yet paying him for each pair. On the front steps of the administration building, Stern saw his wife's car. The Negro, a little flustered, strained for a climactic one and finally said, "Staff get to eat better than the patients. We get better cuts of meat and all we want." Stern let Lennie get his bags on the car rack and stuffed a final five into his pocket.

"You didn't have to tell me any of those," Stern said, getting behind the wheel and taking his last look at the Grove Rest Home. But then, lest he hurt the Negro attendant's feelings, he said, "But thanks," and swept out of the driveway.

* * * * *

"I thought I'd always have it in there, but the parachute is gone," Stern told his wife as they drove home. "It feels as though I have a hot tablecloth around the front of me now, but it's better than the chute."

She sat beside him with one tanned leg folded beneath her, her great eyes glistening, wet with expectancy. She wore a cotton jumper, and when Stern leaned over to kiss her, he saw that her blouse was loose and he could make out the start of her nipples beneath her half bra. It got him nervous, and he said, "Why are you wearing your blouse like that? When you bend over, people can actually see the nipples. That isn't any damned good."

"It isn't?" she said, teasing him. "Oh well, don't worry; it's only when you get real close."

"None of that's funny," said Stern. "I just got out of the goddamned place for my stomach. Do you still go to that dance class?"

"Oh yes," she said, sitting against the door, her eyes huge. "That's what saved me when you were in there. First we dance like crazy and then we congregate at the overnight diner on Olivetti Street. That's the best part. You should hear one of the girls talk. Dirtier than anything you've ever heard. She's a scream. Then José spins me home, since he lives out our way."

"Is there any more of that tongue stuff?" Stern asked.

"Don't be silly," she said. "He kisses everybody. It's what they do."

She hung back against the door, her skirt above her browned knees, and Stern wondered whether she had gone to bed with the instructor, getting into tangled, modern dance positions with him. How did he know she hadn't spent the entire five weeks of his sickness at endless, exhausting, intricately choreographed lovemaking, flying to the instructor seconds after she had deposited Stern at the Home? She seemed curled up, contented, shimmering with peace, as though someone had finally pressed the right buttons and relieved the dry, chattering hunger Stern had never been able to cope with. Perhaps she had gone to him in a desperate way, knowing that the instructor, however thin of bone and feminine of gesture, would never allow her to be insulted and would attack any offender with Latin fury. In any case, the secret was locked between her warm thighs. He would never know what had gone on, and he felt a drooping, weakened sensation and wondered why there couldn't be a chemical test, a litmus paper you could hold up to women to find out how many times they'd been to bed since last you saw them.

"Were having a recital and I've got to rehearse practically every night. It saved me while you were away. I'd have gone crazy."

"I don't know about any recitals," Stern said. "I've got to have everything easy on me. I don't want that thing coming back. I never want to go back to any rest homes. If I go back there, I'm really cooked."

At the Home, several days before Stern left, Rooney, hanging from an overhead porch beam, had told Stern of a merchant seaman who had gotten over an ulcer and who subsequently was incapable of being riled. "You could stick it into him from morning till midnight and he'd just give you a little smile and off he'd go like a contented cow." Now, as he drove home, Stern, who had spoken sharply to his wife and had felt the hot brocade tighten against the front of him, began suddenly to follow the procedure of Rooney's man. He held the controls gently in his hands, tapping lightly on the foot pedals and scanning the road ahead easily, as if too vigorous a motion might topple his head from his shoulders. He began to do things in a slow and mincing way, as though he might be able to whisper and tiptoe through life, hushing his way past death itself. At the tollbooth, he smiled meltingly at the uniformed attendant, and when the man took his fifty cents, Stern said, "Thanks a lot."

"Why did you thank him?" his wife asked.

"Why not?" said Stern.

Later, when they approached the outskirts of Stern's town, they drove past small houses with neatly kept lawns and Stern nodded in a friendly way to the people who stood outside them. He knew they were all gentiles and he wondered what would happen in a pogrom. Which ones, if any, would hide him and his family from the authorities? Probably quite a few, he thought; ones that would surprise him. Probably the people with the most forbidding gentile faces. Ordinarily they'd never have anything to do with Stern, but if it came to a pogrom, with New England crustiness they'd spirit Stern and his family off to attics, saying to one another, "No one's going to tell us what to do with our Jews."

As they drove past the man's house, Stern held his breath and closed his eyes for a second, as though there were a chance it might not be there. He had been away five weeks, and perhaps part of his cure was that the man's house would be swept away or that it would disappear as though it had never been there, much like his vanished ulcer. But the house stood in the same place, and Stern, as he drove by, inclined his head gently toward it, as though he would face whatever horrors lay inside with softness and gentle ways, melting them with his niceness. As he neared his own house, he wondered fleetingly what he, the man down the street, would do in the event of a pogrom. Would he startle Stern by spiriting his despised Jewish neighbors away in his cellar, hating pogroms as even more un-American than Stern?

In his house, Stern sat down in the easy chair of his sparsely furnished living room and said to his wife, "Softly and easily. That's how it's going to have to be. No noise. No upsets."

His son came out with a bandage on his elbow and said, "What's it like to die?"

Stern said, "I'm not doing any dying for a while. But there'll be no rough playing any more. Everything with Daddy is soft and easy. Where did you get the cut? That's the kind of thing I don't want to get involved in, but where did you get it?"

"I found it on me in the morning," said the boy, beginning to suck a blanket.

Stern's wife, who had been boiling eggs for him in the kitchen, hollered in, "There's one last thing you're going to get a kick out of doing. The kind of thing you'll enjoy. I'll tell you about it later."

Stern started to eat the eggs, but they stuck in his throat and he said, "What's the thing? I don't want to get into anything two minutes after I'm back from a rest home."

"I wouldn't tell it to you, except it's the kind of thing you'll enjoy taking care of. Some kids came by on a bike, older than him, and one of them cut his elbow with a mirror and called him 'Matzoh.' I've been furious, but I saved it for you because I know it's the kind of thing you'll want to settle."

"He doesn't live around here, that bad boy," said Stern's son. "He's just visiting someone here. I wish you'd make the boy die."

"Daddies don't make small boys die," said Stern. The brocade that lay across the front of him began to heat up, and he pressed his fist deep into his stomach and held it there, on guard lest another ulcer begin to sprout forth and fill his ribs.

"Nobody seems to have heard what I've been saying," he said to his wife, but then he clasped his son's head and said, "You're right; it is the kind of thing I'd like to take care of." He took the boy to his car, squeezing his hand, and for a second it seemed that the child was really holding _his_ hand, leading Stern and protecting him. He drove the car in a wide arc, as far as possible from the kike man's house, and the child said, "You're going too far. The bad boy won't be around here."

"You point him out to me," said Stern, the front of him on fire, crouched over as though to give the flames less area to ruin. They came to a cluster of seven boys who'd gotten off their bikes to rest, and Stern stopped the car, gripping his son's hand for courage. He went among them and said, "Someone said something to my son and cut him. They said a dirty thing to him, and it had better not happen again."

"Don't make them dead," his son said. "They're not the bad boys."

Stern grabbed the collar of one of them, twisted him close, and said, "I can really get sore, and when I do I can really start swinging. That better not happen again."

The boy looked at him evenly, without fear, and Stern released him. He must have been around twelve, and Stern wondered whether he would remember and two years later, at fourteen, with his body shaping into athletic hardness, come after Stern and pummel him to the ground.

Stern got back into the car with his son and, continuing in the arc, he drove slowly through the streets and stopped alongside a small boy with glasses and large feet who was walking next to the curb, carrying books.

"Someone said something lousy to my son and cut him," Stern said from the car. "I don't like the particular kind of thing they said."

"I'm not a little boy," said the book carrier. "I'm seventeen and finishing high school I'm small and everyone thinks I'm a kid."

"Don't make him dead, Daddy," said Stern's son. Stern felt very sorry for the small high-school student with his big feet, and yet he was thrilled to find someone in the neighborhood who read books and wasn't fierce. He wanted to invite him to his house and give him books, maybe take him to New York to see Broadway plays.

"Come over if you're near my place," said Stern, and drove off.

"I think the bad boy is visiting over there," said Stern's child, pointing in the direction of the house that darkened Stern's every waking moment. Nonetheless, he knitted his eyebrows, bared his teeth, and gunned the motor, as though, by going through the motions of outrage, he would somehow become outraged and the momentum would carry him right up to the man's front door before he had time to change his mind. He raced toward the man's house, and yet, when he reached it, the fraud of his facemaking became apparent to him and he continued on, realizing that he had never intended for a second confronting the man.

In his own home, Stern's wife asked, "Did you find him?" And Stern said, "I don't want to do any finding. Don't you realize I just came home from a Home a few hours ago?"

For one blissful second then, Stern's vision blurred and it seemed that he had gotten it all wrong, that he had not been away at all, and that he was to leave that very evening for a place where everything would be made better for him. But then he caught the edge of a chair, his eyes cleared, and he realized that he really had been away. The thought that he had come back to find his situation unchanged was maddening. It was as though he had been guaranteed that the treatment would heal his neighborhood as well as his ulcer--and that the guarantee had turned out to have secret clauses, rendering it worthless. The man was still there. The hospital had not had him removed. His wife had not somehow arranged to have him eliminated. His father had not gone down the street to thrust his scarred nose up in the man's face. No hand had reached down from the heavens and declared that the man had never existed. He was still right there in his house, not even seriously sick.

Stern went upstairs, and as he sat on the edge of his bed he felt a small spring inside him stretch and finally break, leaving his body in a great tremble. He lay back on the bed, as though mere contact with a bed could cure anything, but he could not quiet himself, and so he dialed Fabiola.

"A brand new thing has happened," Stern told him. "There's a tremble in me and I can't control it. The thing is, I've just come _back_ from the damned rest home. Can you just come back from a place like that and have something like this happen?"

"Yes," said Fabiola. "You'd better avoid tension or you're going to wind up back there again. Remember that and call me if you get into more trouble."

Stern got on his knees now, as though in prayer, clutching fistfuls of sheet and trying to squeeze out the tremble. The bedroom windows were darkening with night when his wife appeared, flinging off her shorts, combing her hair, and saying, "I've got to go to rehearsals."

"Look," Stern said, "I'm going to ask you something, and I really have to. I've got a new thing and I have to have you here. I'm not talking about any ulcer but something really new and lousy."

"You mean you want me to give up the dancing? It's the only thing I have out here."

"You don't know what this new deal is," said Stern. As though to demonstrate, he began to take short, gasping breaths. It started as a plea for sympathy, but when he tried to stop he found he couldn't and he began to cry. "Let's get out of here. Oh, let's sell this house. We don't belong here. You'll have to handle all the details. Oh, I'm really in trouble now."

_Part Four_

It was a jangled, careening period that followed, and later he could remember it only as a black piece torn from his life rather than a number of days or weeks. He knew that it began trembling on the edge of a bed at midnight and he remembered how it ended, but he could pick out only single frenzied moments in between, as though it were all down on a giant mural he was examining in darkness with an unreliable flashlight There was no good part of the day for him during this period, but it was the mornings that seemed the worst because there were always a giddy few minutes when it seemed he was going to be all right. But a dry, shriveling tremble would soon come over him, and it was then that he had to hold on to things, as though to keep himself on the ground. He held on to chairs and desks and he held on to himself, always keeping one fist buried deeply in his side, as though to nail himself down and join together the pieces of human spring that had snapped within him. Going to work was a stifled, desperate time, and there was at least one ride when, sealed up in the train, holding the bottom of his seat with all his might, he thought he was not going to be able to make it and said to the man next to him, "I'm in a lot of trouble. You may have to grab me in a second." He remembered that the man, who smoked a pipe and wore his hat down low, had hardly looked surprised and said, "I'll keep an eye on you," and then gone back to his _Times_.

He was certain, on these rides to the city, that he would lose his breath and begin to bite things so that heavyset men, who'd been college athletes, would have to sit on him in mid-aisle, pressing his face to the floor, while conductors signaled on ahead to alert authorities. Each time the train pulled in, Stern would race gratefully to the street, sucking in hot blasts of summer air, stunned that he had made it.

In his office, on these mornings, a motor, powered by rocket fuels, ran at a dementedly high idle somewhere between his shoulder blades. He could not sit and he could not stand, and he remembered his narrow business room as a place to crouch and sweat and hope for time to pass. A film seemed to seal him off from the others around him. Unable to think, his mind an endless white lake, he touched papers and opened drawers and felt pencils, as though by physically going through remembered motions the work would get done. He did these things in short, frenzied bursts, holding on to a table with one hand; it seemed that someone was pulling him into the ground. At noon, his fist socked deep into his stomach, as though to seal it like a cork, he would run to a nearby park, where he would fling off his jacket, lie on his back, and stick his face in the sun, praying that he might sleep or disappear into the grass. Once he slept a long while in his office clothes, his face burning up in the heat. He awakened at a crazy, magical time of day, cool and grateful, the trembling stilled, and for a moment he thought it might be over. But then the motor turned over quietly and began to hum.

There was, too, during that period, a numb and choking fear of his boss, Belavista, that formed suddenly and oppressed Stern. He crouched within his office and gripped his desk and waited for the Brazilian to call. The man's confident morning steps in the hall sent Stern looking for a place to hide. The phone ring became a knife, and once, when it was late and Belavista summoned him, he flew first to the bathroom and locked the toilet stall. He could remember that later, in the front office, Belavista had stood for a long time without talking, his charred millionaire's face staring out of the skylight, while Stern died in his tracks. Turning finally, he had said, "How are things going in there?" And Stern, his tongue shriveling in his mouth, had said, "I just can't," and had run to put his face up to the park sun, grunting and squeezing his fists blood red, as though he could force and fight his way into a sleep.

His house, once he had screamed "Let's sell," became a dirty and infected place to Stern, and nights, returning home at a desperate clip, he could remember running lightly across the lawn, as though he did not want to make contact with the grass; lowering his head, so that he would not have to see the outside walls; and failing to touch the alien banister as he flew up to his bed, which was safe and clean and would go with him to the new place. He spent evenings on his bed, the cold sheets pacifying him, and he could remember a phone call after dark in which a man's voice had moaned out at him, "I saw your ad about the house. I don't want to know about anything but this: what kind of a neighborhood is it? I mean, is it mixed? Oh, I don't want it to be all my kind, but it's got to be half and half, a little of everything. I can't tell you how important that part is." And Stern had moaned back, "Oh, I know; I really know," joining the man in tears.

There was a time when the house seemed the key to it all, an enemy that sucked oil and money and posted a kike-hating sentry down the street to await Stern's doom. But then Stern imagined himself on the twelfth story of a city apartment building, his house sold, sealed in now by new kike men, with different faces, occupying the three other apartments on his floor. He pictured himself high above the city at night, clawing at the windows. And during what must have been a weekend he told a solemn Swede who'd come to look the house over, "We have to stay here and have changed our mind."

The Swede, his head among a forest of basement pipes, hollered down, "Is it because I'm looking at the pipes?" And Stern said, "No, I'm too sick to move," and gave his wife the job of evicting the man.

Late at night, as he clutched his sheets in the darkness, ideas seemed to seize him by the throat, making him rock and cry and pray for sleep. The deep hot valleys of his wife's body frightened him now, and he could remember pulling her awake one night and saying, "You've got to get out of that dance thing. I know you don't go to bed with people, but the thought that you might is driving me crazy. I don't like to do this to you, but it'll just be for now, while I'm going through this thing."

"All right, I won't go to it any more."

"But that's not enough," he said. "What about every second I'm not with you? It would be easy for you to just pull up your skirt for someone. The second I leave the house. Or when you're just going alone somewhere. I'd never know."

"I'm not going to do anything," she said.

"I know, but you could. You could just flip up your skirt and open your legs and that would be it. It wouldn't take two minutes. And I don't want any man's thing in you. What would I do if that happened?"

"Well, then, what do you want me to do?"

"I don't know. But it's always going to be that way, all our lives." And he locked his hand around her wrist, as though only by holding her that way could he prevent her from flying out of the room in a desperate hunt for alien bodies.

He waited those nights for the trembling to stop, the engine to stop pumping. There had always been an end to bad things before--fevers dropped, homicidal dreams were chased by the dawn, and once, when he was a boy, his arm, heavy with a great infection, had suddenly fizzled and gone back to normal. But, now, it was as though he were an automobile with a broken horn, doomed to blare forever in a quiet residential neighborhood, all wiring experts having long been shipped out of the country. Sometimes, writhing and wet on the sheets at midnight, he would tell his wife, "I'm touching bottom," but it wasn't really true. He seemed to be holding on to a twig, halfway down a sheer, rain-slick mountain. How nice it would be to let go. But he had only $800, and it would be eaten up quickly if he were put in a sanatorium. He imagined himself in such a place at the end of three days, the $800 gone, in a terrible panic, unable even to lie back and be crazy with the other patients. And so he held on to the twig and he clutched at people, too, pulling at men's lapels and women's skirts on steaming city streets, telling them he was in bad trouble.

When it got so bad it seemed he'd have to smash himself against something to make the trembling stop, he would take some stranger's sleeve in the city and say, "I know this is going to sound crazy, but I'm pretty upset here and wish you would just talk to me a second." It amazed him that no one was perturbed by this. People seemed to welcome the chance to exchange wisdoms at midday with a strangulating young man. And Stern, no matter how banal their words, would attach great and profound significance to them, adopting each piece of advice as a slogan to live by. "I'm going to tell you something that's going to help you, fellow," an elderly gentleman said to him. "I was in trouble once, too, and I decided then and there never to give anyone more'n half a loaf. You remember that and you'll never go wrong again." And Stern said to him, "You know, that's right. I can see where, if you follow that, you'll always come out right." And he went off, determined to stop giving up entire loaves, convinced he had come up with the key to his trembling. A Negro ice-cream salesman told him, "You got to stop lookin' for things," and a retired jewelry executive, seized in a restaurant, advised him against "letting any person get hold of you." In both cases, Stern had said, "You know, you've really got it. I'm going to remember that."

He recalled being in many places and then running, choking, out of them. Once in a darkened, cavernlike restaurant, he ordered six lunchtime courses and thought to himself, "This is the end of it. I'm going to sit here like all the other men and eat, and when I leave this table it's all going to be over." But the service was slow, he lost his breath, and when the juice came, he gulped it down, threw out clumps of dollars, and flew from the pitlike restaurant, clawing for air. Another time, floundering across the hot city pavements, on an impulse he plunged into a physical culture studio and signed up for a six-year course. "I want to start right this minute," he said, and was shown to a locker. In shorts, he went into the gym, where the only person exercising was a great, bearlike man with oil-slick hair and huge, ballooning arms. He said to Stern, "Come here. Were you in the Army?"

"I was a flier," said Stern.

"I took a lot of crap from a drill sergeant in the Marines," said the man. "He'd stand out there, and the bullshit would come out of him in quart bottles, but do you know the only thing that saved me?"

"What's that?"

"His arms. They weren't even sixteens. I've got eighteens, myself. He'd stand there, and the shit would flow about how tough he was, but all you'd have to do is look at his arms and it didn't mean anything. How am I supposed to respect a man who doesn't have arms?"

"You can't," said Stern.

"Well, I'm going to do some arm work," the man said, and began to curl a great dumbbell into his lap. Stern watched his arms expand and said, "I can't seem to get started today." He dressed and then ran, gasping and unshowered, for the daylight.

Once, when the sound of Belavista's slippered footsteps down the hall sent him spinning into the streets, he ran into a telephone booth and called Fabiola.

"This thing isn't getting any better," he said. "It's like I swallowed an anthill. I'm jumping through my ass. You've got to send me to someone."

"Psychiatry's up in the air," said Fabiola. "There's the cost, too. Take a grain of pheno when you feel upset this way."

"I don't care about any expense. I don't think you know what's going on with me. It isn't the ulcer any more. I'd take a dozen of those compared to this new thing."

"All right, then," said Fabiola. "There's one good man. He's ten per session, and he _has_ helped people."

"I really want to see him, then," said Stern.

The psychiatrist was a rail-thin man who talked with a lisp and whose office smelled musty and psychiatric. It bothered Stern that he had only one tiny diploma on the wall.

"Can it hurt me?" Stern asked.

"No," said the man. "Sometimes you dig down and come up with something very bad, but generally it helps."

"There's probably something lousy like that in me," said Stern. "How much is this going to cost?"

"Twenty a session."

Stern began to choke and said, "I heard ten. Oh God, I can't pay twenty." He gasped and sobbed and the man seemed to panic along with him.

"Maybe there's something about money," said the lisping psychiatrist. "Some people think it's dirty."

"No, no, it's the amount. Oh God, don't you just want to _help_ people?" He got up, gasping, sucking in musty, psychiatric air, and the psychiatrist, gasping and white, too, said, "Maybe you think money has a smell. We could go into that."

"No, no," said Stern, "we're not going into anything. Imagine how you'd feel expecting ten and then hearing twenty." And with that he ran, crouching, through the door, with the panic-stricken psychiatrist hollering after him, "You've got a money neurosis."

One night, when for an hour or so there had been no gathering shriveling tremble inside him and it had seemed he might be done with it, he remembered being in a cramped and sultry theater with his wife, watching _Hedda Gabler_. He got through an act all right, but when Hedda tossed the writer's book manuscript into the furnace, he stood up in the stifling theater, shouted "Aye," and ran through the tiny exit, where he sat on the curb and waited for his wife.

Toward the end of it, he went everywhere with his arms folded tightly in front of him, as though he were naked in the snow. He bit down hard on things then, whatever was available--the drapes, a coffee cup, the corner of his desk--and yet there came over him, too, during this time, a kind of wild and gurgling courage he had never had before. Once, he ran with teeth clenched through a crowded train station, as though he were a quarterback going downfield, lashing out at people with his elbows, bulling along with his shoulders. One man said, "What do you think you're doing?" And Stern hollered back, "I didn't see you. You're insignificant-looking." When a cop stopped him for running through a stop sign, Stern heard himself saying, "Is this your idea of a crime? With what's going on in this country--rape and everything?" It was a perspiring, released kind of feeling he had when he was at his most desperate, and it gave him courage one day to seize a girl in his building who had seemed unapproachable. Tall and blond, with horn-rimmed glasses, she had a tight-skirted, whiplike body and spoke with a shrill, slightly hysterical British accent. Stern saw her in elevators for the most part, talking to a girl friend, a book on some declining civilization always pressed against her high, intellectual bosom. The word "problem" seemed to crop up in her every sentence.

"That's one of my problems."

"The man undoubtedly has a sexual problem."

Stern thought she was maddeningly intellectual and wanted to be with her in her small, book-lined apartment, kissing her hair as she discussed declining civilizations, spending long hours working out sick, tangled sexual problems.

One day outside the building, he took her arm and said, "This is crazy, but I don't know any other way to do it. I've seen you a lot in the elevator, and I'm in pretty bad trouble now, and I wonder if you'd mind my just walking along awhile with you."

"I have to meet someone," she said.

"I'm in pretty bad shape," Stern said, holding on to her arm. "I've got a whole bunch of problems and I have to just tell them to someone."

"Yes," she said, freeing herself with a shrill little laugh. "But I don't like men's hands on me."

At the tail end of it, with courage forming along the bottom of him like vegetable shoots, it pleased him to make detailed and shocking phone calls to his mother and sister.

"I actually chew on drapes," he told his mother at midnight. "I pull at my skin and I won't have my job for long. I expect to go into an institution and not come out of it."

"I haven't had that in my life?" she said. "I haven't had much worse? I've had the same thing. You can't scare me."

"How would you like to see your son peeled off the fender of a speeding car? It's going to happen, you know."

And to his sister, long-distance, he said, "Oh, it's a breakdown, all right. Dying doesn't scare me in the least. It'll be in about a week or so. They're going to find me in a tub. I'll bet you're amazed that I can discuss it so calmly. Bet it really shakes you up to think it's happening to your own brother, who used to tell all those jokes."

He expected that if it ever did end, it would peter out, with a little less trembling and choking each day, but it surprised him by finishing up abruptly in a quite unexplainable way after a talk with a Polish woman who had come to clean his house.

Through it all, amazingly, he had never thought once of the kike man. Sliding down the mountain, he had been too busy casting about for things to clutch to think very much about who had pushed him. If the man had stopped him on the street, Stern, hunched over, fists planted in his waist to quiet the erupting, might have brushed on by and said, "I have no time to fool around."

On the night that it ended, his wife had gone to the movies, and Stern, a crawling, bone-deep shiver coming over him, had flicked off the television set and found the Polish woman on her knees in the broom closet. A small, pinched wrinkle of a woman, she seemed to have been made from a compound of flowered discount dresses, cleaning fluid, and lean Polish winters. She shook her head continually and muttered pieces of thoughts, finishing none of them. Stern talked to her for two hours and found her scattered, wise-sounding incantations soothing.