Disengaging the deadbolt, opening the door, seeming to be surprised by the rain, he said, “Makes no sense in this weather. Sludge can wait. It’s just sludge.” Closing the door, locking it, turning, he said, “Lung cancer ate up Edward R. Murrow, too, but pardon the hell out of me if I ain’t grievin’ over that, ’cause all them big-time newsmen like him ain’t nothin’ but puppets for the Bilder—”
He cut off in mid-word, cocked his head, and looked at me as if what I’d been saying had gotten to him on a delayed broadcast.
“Who’re you talkin’ about, Jonah?”
“The pretty lady in Six-C.”
When I had seen her sleeping bag and satchel, no furniture or other luggage, I thought maybe she was a squatter, that she might have picked the lock and settled in until someone found her and made her leave. She seemed too good-looking for a squatter, but you never know. When she’d threatened to hurt me if I talked about her to anyone, my suspicion seemed to have been half confirmed.
Now Mr. Smaller proved me wrong. “You think she’s pretty?”
“Well, sure, because she is.”
“Not to me she ain’t. Truly pretty’s more than looks. She’s got a hard, cold edge can’t never be pretty. A piece of work, that one.”
I knew what he meant. But now I was puzzled. “Then why did you rent to her?”
Coming down the ramp, he reminded me of a well-meaning troll in a kid’s book I’d read. On the part of his head that wasn’t bald, the black hair bristled everywhichway, like ragged twist
s of steel wool.
“Son, I don’t do no rentin’. The lease agents work downtown, where corporate bastards get big pay for pickin’ their noses.” He stopped at the buckets, considered them, decided to leave them where they were. He walked back toward the boilers. “Black-hearted company owns maybe a hundred dumps like this. I’m just a guy gets free rent, piss-poor pay, and all the cockroaches I want in return for keepin’ this here place from fallin’ down on top of us.”
Following him, I said, “What’s her name?”
“Eve Adams.”
“Are you sure?”
“So I been told. Name could be Frankenstein, for all I care. She ain’t no business of mine. Ain’t a renter. She gets free rent like me, but only two months, till she scrapes off all the peelin’ wallpaper in Six-C, takes up the crumblin’ linoleum, paints the walls. She goes place to place doin’ the same. Everybody has a way of gettin’ by in a hard world.”
As he picked up his toolbox from beside the boiler, I said, “She doesn’t look like an Eve Adams.”
“Is that so? What does an Eve Adams look like?”
“Not like her. She should have a prettier name.”
He stared at me for a moment and then put down the toolbox. He settled into a squat, so that we were eye to eye. “Young boys, they get crushes sometimes. Had one on my second-grade teacher. Not just how she looked. The way she was, all she was. Figured she’d wait till I growed up, so then we’d be together forever. Damn, but don’t I find out she’s married. Broke my stupid heart. Then what happens but she divorces him and marries some other guy. I realize she don’t know—or care—how I love her. So then I hated her as best I could, but that hurt me, not her. When you grow up, Jonah, women are gonna break your heart so often, you lose count. You want my best advice? Don’t let them start on you so young as you are.”
I didn’t have a crush on Fiona Cassidy, aka Eve Adams, who in my experience might have been a maniac or even a witch. But for two reasons, I chose not to reveal as much to Mr. Smaller. First, it was nice of him to care about what happened to my heart, and he might be embarrassed if I told him that his tender advice was misdirected. Second, and more important, he must never let the woman know that I had been asking about her. She liked to cut; I didn’t like being cut. His assumption that I had a crush on her gave me reason to plead with him not to humiliate me by informing her of my infatuation.
He swore to keep my secret, and I promised to heed his advice. With a handshake we sealed our agreement: two men of the world, generations apart yet nonetheless united by our recognition that romance was perilous and that no other sadness quite equaled the sorrow of unrequited love.
Rising to his full height, Mr. Smaller morphed from fatherly advice-giver to his more familiar role as paranoid curmudgeon. As peals of thunder rolled through the city and storm light flickered at the high basement windows, he said, “Got work to do, though it don’t make no sense to do it if we’re gonna nuke the Russians and they’re itchin’ to nuke us. War here, war there, crime everywhere, yet nobody cares about nothin’ but the Beatles and some guy who paints giant soup cans and sells them as art, this movie star, that movie star, blah-blah-blah. The world’s a nuthouse. It’s insane. It’s scary. It’s—”
“—those Bilderbergers,” I suggested.
“Ain’t truer words ever been spoken.”
23
Because I didn’t feel like making my way to the community center in the rain, I should have gone down to the second floor and rung Mrs. Lorenzo’s bell and joined her little day-care group. I wasn’t supposed to spend more than a few minutes alone in our apartment when my mother was at work. For a boy my age, I was responsible, and my mother had no reason to worry that I would do something like play with matches and burn down the building. Nevertheless, she was more of a Bledsoe than she was a Kirk, and Bledsoes didn’t leave a young child alone for extended periods of time during which he might be tempted to engage in one type of misbehavior or another.
Half a century after the fact, I better understand my potential for mischief than I did back in the day. In spite of all the trouble that found me, I wonder in retrospect why I didn’t bring even more calamity down upon myself.
I knew that my mother’s rules were not to be subjected to the creative interpretations that wily attorneys brought to the wording of laws that snared their criminal clients. She was a plainspoken woman who said what she meant. But after leaving Mr. Smaller to his grumbling in the basement, I convinced myself that the rule against being alone in our apartment for an extended period of time didn’t apply to lingering alone for hours elsewhere in the building, as if Mom would approve of me loitering in concealment for the purpose of spying on one of our neighbors.
I took the back stairs to the sixth floor. Looked through the small window in the door. No one. Imagining myself to be as stealthy as Napoleon Solo, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., which had been a hit on TV the previous year and had fired my imagination even though the stories never made sense to me, I traveled shadow-quiet along the public hallway, Apartment 6-C to my right.