Mark Fishman - No. 22 Pleasure City

Maybe Angela was serious about Burnett. He hadn’t thought of that. Pohl shook his head, his stomach was tied up in knots. But his mind took it further than competition between two women for a man and finished with an ugly picture of Violet taking Angela out of this world. Now he really wasn’t feeling very good with the taste of death in his mouth. Violet might have killed her. He was chasing after some kind of logic and what he’d come up with didn’t make any sense to him.

His mouth clamped shut, he went on walking until he tripped on the uneven sidewalk. Pohl smiled. He leaned against a lamppost and lit a cigarette. He stood there watching the street, the people, the cars, and a late-night bus pull away from the curb. He took a drag on the cigarette. He went on dragging at it until it was down to a stub, hurled the stub to the sidewalk and stepped on it.

The bar where he’d gone to urinate, the street where he’d tripped on the sidewalk, and the last cigarette he’d smoked were far behind him now because he was making his way down Prospect, heading toward Angela’s place, with her apartment house not far away on Lake Street in the shadowy places between streetlights.

Pohl found a suitable doorway, stepped into its darkness and leaned against the protruding edge of the doorframe, waiting. He watched the entrance of Angela’s building, knowing it was useless to wait for her because she’d disappeared but so determined to see her that what made sense for someone else didn’t matter to him. He lit a cigarette. He was going to wait until the sky brightened enough to tell him to go home.

Shimura turned the steering wheel to the right, brought the car to the curb. He was a half-block from where he lived on Ruby Avenue. He walked to the all-night corner market at Ruby and 12th. There was a middle-aged man with dark skin and dark hair and bright brown eyes and a beer bottle in one hand, standing in front of the vegetables laid out in rows next to the refrigerator filled with bottles of sparkling water, fruit juice, soda and ice-cold beer. Shimura opened the glass door and picked up two bottles of sparkling water.

The middle-aged man gathered handfuls of green beans and dumped them in a plastic bag and tied the bag shut, counted out a half-dozen carrots and dropped them in another bag, then selected four ripe tomatoes. He picked up a box of macaroni. Shimura watched him out of the corner of an eye, paid for the bottled water, added some change for a late edition newspaper and stood in front of the market looking at the front page.

What he read said nothing new to him, there was nothing new to tell in the world, now as then, except maybe the location was new, where something happened, or the people involved in what happened were different people, and whatever was behind it all, one way or another, the reason was always the same, it was just one thing, and it would always be just one thing, and that one thing was really two things rolled into one, the most important of them was money, and the other was sex. Shimura looked up from the newspaper at the man leaving the market with his macaroni, vegetables, and a bottle of beer.

Pohl looked down at the dozen cigarette butts at his feet. He pushed them with the edge of his shoe, stepped out of the doorway to the sidewalk and started down the street. He looked over his shoulder at the entrance to Angela’s building. A taxi pulled up, a man got out and went into the building. There had been no sign of Angela. A van delivering dry cleaning turned the corner in front of Pohl. He thought about sleep. At last he was looking forward to going home.

A battered red car was parked every night in front of his apartment building on Fourteenth Street and he saw it now as he wearily rounded the corner. At the same time he spotted the car he saw the man he’d collided with the night he’d seen Angela perform for Burnett.

The man walked along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. Pohl crossed the street, moved slowly toward him. The early morning light poured lavender into a yellowish-gray sky. The man was smoking a cigar. He came to a stop in front of Pohl, who stared at him. The man wore a loose, turquoise-blue silk shirt that hung over the waistband of his wide trousers. He looked Pohl up and down, smiled at him as he chewed on the end of the cigar. Thick smoke swirled up in front of his face. Pohl couldn’t swallow the coincidence.

“This tickles me,” the man said. “It’s really funny.”

“I don’t want to know anything.” Pohl was cautious.

“So, we meet again,” the man stated flatly.

“No objection?” Pohl remembered the words the man had said the first time they’d met.

“Know where I’ve been?”

“Not again. Don’t tell me,” Pohl said.

“It’s what I like to do.”

“I asked you politely.”

“I work a lot,” he confided. “I spend my money the way I want to spend it.”

“That’s not my business.”

“Fucking is the best thing I can think of doing.” The man exhaled a cloud of smoke, grinning. “I’ve got the right to do it because I’ve got the money to pay for it.”

Pohl turned away from him, crossed the street, heading for the battered red car. He leaned against the fender, stared at nothing. The man followed him, stood in front of him, waved his hand in front of Pohl’s face.

“I was just fucking,” the man said. “Nobody’s going to bite you. We’re having a conversation. Do you hear me?”

Pohl snapped out of it, his gaze with a parade of questions in his eyes returned to the man in front of him.

The man’s face glowed with a healthy complexion, the cigar stuck straight out of his mouth between thick, pinkish lips. A smile worked its way onto the lips, a perceptive smile that narrowed his eyes.

“Let me answer one of them.”

“One of them, what?” Pohl asked.

“Questions.”

Pohl blinked, folded his arms across his chest and stared straight ahead.

“I’m here to tell you all your worrying is for nothing,” the man said. “Fucking is what you want. It’s the solution to everything.”

Pohl opened his mouth to say something, and his mouth stayed open, but no sound came out. The man reached out, put a warm, human hand on Pohl’s shoulder, then turned and walked away. A cloud of cigar smoke trailed up over the man’s head. Pohl looked at it, and it told him there would be trouble if he didn’t find Angela because she was the fire that got him going and he was the smoldering smoke that came from it, and without her he didn’t exist. He pushed away from the red car, went to the entrance of his building, opened the door and let it swing shut behind him.

Shimura sat in the kitchen with a glass of sparkling water and ice, looking at his small, almost feminine hands spread out on the tabletop in front of him. He heard the clock above the kitchen sink ticking off the time. It was late. There were no other sounds in the building.

Professional necessity had given him the ability to turn his eyes without the use of his head and he did this while he sat at the table taking an occasional sip of water. His eyes caught something like the presence of Burt Pohl. Other than that, whatever he saw was familiar and it meant everything and nothing to him because he’d been looking for a long time at what he had and where he lived. He was used to seeing all of this but not, out of the corner of his eye, the presence of Pohl without Pohl really being in the kitchen with him.

What he saw wasn’t really Pohl, of course, but it was the worrying Pohl was giving him because worrying was just as much a part of friendship for him as honesty or brotherhood. A friend like anyone else was capable of making a mistake or losing his power of reason over a woman, and it was his duty to worry about it and maybe do what he could to bring that power of reason back to Pohl.