Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

I had an appointment that afternoon with Orbach, up on Eightieth Street. I looked over the suite, smelled the flowers, called Henri Bendel’s to order my cooking pots, and decided to walk to Orbach’s and pick up a few cookbooks on the way. Maybe there would be spring vegetables in, from the South, if the Mafia wasn’t in disarray from its quarrels. I called a couple of lawyers and gave them my phone number and left.

Walking up Third Avenue, I found myself looking in store windows, not at cookbooks but at clocks. I was doing that a lot these days, developing a fascination with timepieces, with the passing of time. I noticed birthdays as I never had, would remember trivial things that had happened on a given day a year before. This started when I turned fifty. I was becoming aware that my days are numbered, that I am going to die and rot like everybody else and that I’d better get my ass in gear if I want to live my life as Ben Belson and not as some fucked-over replica of my father. I know I’ve made a lot of money and fame for myself, have traveled everywhere, have bedded a lot of women and eaten a lot of the world’s best food, and my father did none of those things. But for twenty years something in my soul has been on HOLD, waiting, going through the motions of having a filled and good life but inside feeling morose and sullen. And there, looking at clocks in yet another Third Avenue window, I was waiting for the time to run out, waiting to join my father in the underground brigade—to terminate, with the smell of wet earth.

And, realizing that, or some of it, I was seized with anger of a kind I hadn’t felt in years. I wanted to rush into the store and smash every clock in the place. Instead, I went in and bought a Chinese wristwatch. I’m wearing it now, here on Belson. I am an eccentric in many small ways; this watch is the first I’ve ever owned. Now that I have time to reckon with.

A voice in me cries desperately, Hurry, Ben!

Looking back on it, I can see that picnic on Juno was a turning point for me. I have become even more of a hermit now than ever before; but something happened there on Juno that moved a big chunk of the gray old glacier inside. In college I never sat around and drank with my classmates; if I were with two or more people at a time something became stiff in my soul. I did not hate people; I never have. But there was a coldness in me that would, to my despair at times, cut me off from my fellows. Somehow it dropped from me at that picnic and I felt an easy comfort in the presence of the crew that I had never felt before. Mimi sang “Downtown” and “Michigan Water Blues,” and I drank red wine from a passed-around bottle and lay back on that moist grass in the grape-flavored air; I would look at the faces of the crew and silently beam. Sometimes between songs everybody would be silent, listening to the quiet, papery sounds of those extraterrestrial leaves blowing in that fruity breeze, feeling the rich, oxygen-laden air on our cheeks. I thought from time to time of Juno herself, the original Juno who slept on hay and whose massive nostrils exhaled steamed horse breath into the Ohio night air at my side, and some of the deep old fondness I felt for her was transferred to this new and generous planet and to the people, mostly young, who lay about on its spongy and inviting surface with me.

Yet here I am alone on Belson.

Still, I have my vegetables. And my morphine. The rings are out. It’s time to shut off the computer that is typing this, collect the morphine from the synthesizer, and shoot up. I wish I could masturbate right now, here alone under the rings of my own namesake planet.

I first came to New York in 2025. I was thirteen. Aunt Myra had suggested I spend one of my high-school summers with her on the Upper East Side. I’d never met her. My parents sent me off on a Greyhound bus, telling me the city would help in my education. I bought my own ticket, and what Aunt Myra didn’t pay for in New York I paid for myself. I had a large coal route in those days in Athens. Burning coal in home stoves was still legal, and I pulled a child’s wagon around the poorer parts of town selling it by the lump: two dollars for the small ones and four for the large. My markup was 40 percent. I hauled that damned wagon up and down hills about eleven miles every day after school and my shoulders would ache from it for hours afterward, but I wound up, at fifteen, with a 5 percent interest in the mine it came out of. By the time I was thirty-five I owned most of the coal in America that the Mafia didn’t. I can picture myself now on that bus in my white shirt and tie and with a half-dozen hundred-dollar bills folded up and safety-pinned inside my shirt pocket. Half a fried chicken and two hard-boiled eggs in a paper sack beside me on the seat until I had a chance to throw them away. A fresh haircut. That may have been the last time in my life I wore a necktie. Except for my wedding.

The bus was a coal-burner and there was something wrong with the boiler; we kept losing power on hills. The trip took almost three days. I ate soy protein-and-gravy sandwiches at bus stops all along the way, and in men’s rooms in Pennsylvania and New Jersey read graffiti of the rankest kind I have ever seen. I knew almost nothing about sex except that it had something to do with social class and that people like my parents were alarmed by it; those graffiti shone in my brain like neon. Many of them were illustrated, with low draftsmanship but high energy. It was for me a connection, however disquieting, with an outside world in which things went on I had thought went on only in my own head. A couple of those drawings are still in my memory; they can still send a wicked thrill into my balls.

For several hours between towns in Pennsylvania an amply built young woman with glasses and dark nylons sat beside me. For a while she made bland comments on the scenery and on her job as a small-town video librarian; then she slept. As her body adjusted itself in sleep her skirt inched up her thighs. Oh Jesus, I remember those thighs! Those cheap dark stockings, the white flesh above them! She snored lightly, with her lips parted. At the first sidelong sight of inner thigh my joint rose with the mindless alacrity of a Marine’s salute. The smell of her Woolworth perfume intensified in my nostrils. I had become so sensitive, so alert, that I could even smell her flesh in its genteel sweatiness from my circumspect position sitting erectly beside her. Erectly. I could have driven nails with it. I pretended to be reading a book.

It was midafternoon; there were few others on the bus. If I were on that bus now I would reach my hand out toward her open lap rather than my own closed one. But what did I know then? I looked around and saw that no one was looking. I allowed myself to turn my head slightly, enough to see what was now a dark hiatus between her thighs, parted and inclined toward me. I let my hand fall gently in my lap and in that moment discovered self-abuse. My palm, touching myself, was instantly wet. My blood circulation had become disorderly; I felt faint. The pleasure had been momentary but so intense as to open a door in my spirit that has never closed. I saw in a flash that my parents were fools and that the world had punch.

An hour later I slipped my right hand into my pants pocket and did it again, more slowly. It was ecstasy. To hell with my undershorts. I would throw them away.

I would have given my soul to slip myself inside what that pink margin hid from view, to have felt it grip my adolescent member. It did not occur to me she might have liked it too. She had said she was on vacation for a week. I could have taken her to a Holiday Inn in some Pennsylvania coal town and we could have fucked ourselves silly. Oh Christ!