Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

“Do what?”

“Five different women I’ve seen you with in the past two months.”

“Friends, Alan, those are my friends.”

Zwelish crushed his cigarette under his running shoe, the way he wanted to stub out Blondy’s line of defense. “Don’t bullshit me. I see them lean into you. That’s not friends.”

“When you reach my age, women lean into you for a variety of reasons.”

“I could use some friends like that.”

Blondy felt he’d been offered a significant confidence. Insouciant as he was, he hadn’t ever felt that he could quite ask a man as unattractive as Zwelish how he made do. Before any tenderness broke out between them, however, Zwelish thrust a knife in. “I’ve seen you hitting on those illiterate babysitters, too. The whole block talks about it, you know.”

This prospect tipped Blondy back on his heels for an instant: that he, who prided himself on his panoramic insight into Seventy-eighth Street, could be under the microscope himself. And, using that instant, Zwelish made his escape.

*

A bruising friendship, if it was one. And, like Blondy and me at the movies, many weeks could pass between encounters. Did Blondy only fantasize that Zwelish peered out of his basement window slats deciding whether or not, on a given afternoon, he wanted to see Blondy? In any case, when they did meet, Zwelish generally seemed to have some willful challenge ready, as if he prepared with flash cards. “Not awake yet?” if he saw Blondy with coffee in the afternoon. “Never awake at all anymore,” Blondy would say, always willing to play the decrepit jester, the has-been, hoping he could un-push Zwelish’s buttons. “Want a job, Blondy? You should write an opera about Donald Trump. He’s what passes for a hero these days!” Blondy didn’t compose operas, but never mind. Still, after Zwelish’s initial remark they’d often fall into the earlier style of more relaxed banter. And Zwelish sometimes let his guard down and complained, obscurely, about “modern urban women.” He’d only gloss the topic, and Blondy didn’t press at the sore point. Zwelish seemed to know how vulnerable Zwelish wanted to get.

“Can’t you get one of those babysitters to do your laundry for you?” Zwelish said one day when he saw Blondy humping a Santa Clausian bag to the Chinese dry cleaner. Zwelish seemed particularly keen and chipper, and rolled up his sleeve to show off a nicotine patch. More bragging. He explained that he’d already stepped down two patch levels, after fifteen years of pack-a-day smoking.

“I never thought of this before,” said Blondy, “but if you wanted to smoke but were having trouble getting started, the patch could really do the trick, couldn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you wanted to be a smoker,” Blondy said, explicating the joke. “You could step up instead of down.” Zwelish brought out his silly side; he couldn’t help it. “Once you get to the top level, you tear off that patch and — voilà!—you’d want a cigarette urgently .”

“Fuck you,” Zwelish said, and walked away. His self-improvements were apparently no laughing matter.

Yet Sigismund Blondy, being who he was, found Zwelish all the more precious for his touchiness. He constituted a test that Blondy, who’d sledded on pure charm through so many controversies, couldn’t pass. He adored Zwelish for causing him, at this late date, to want to do better, try harder, give more.

It was months later that the real opportunity came: Alan Zwelish’s definitive self-renovation, one that Blondy instantly vowed to treat only reverently, beatifically. Zwelish returned from a mysterious trip in possession of an Asian wife. Blondy heard it first from another neighbor (shades of “the whole block knows”), who included a nosy speculation as to whether the union had been made by online advertisement or some other mechanical arrangement, before he saw her for himself. From Vietnam, it was revealed when they met on the street, and tiny enough to make Zwelish look tall. Doris, Zwelish introduced her as, though he later confided that her name was something else, Do Lun or Du Lan. Bright dark eyes and features so precise they seemed tooled. At this first meeting Blondy clasped Zwelish’s hand, took his elbow, gave his warmest congratulations. Almost bent to kiss Doris, but thought better. She was too self-contained and skittish, a cipher. Zwelish pulled her close to him, seeming for once immune to hurt, a being formed only of pride and delight. Blondy was a part of the family, if only because at the moment anyone, even a passing stranger, would have been. Blondy watched them disappear into the basement apartment, Zwelish gallantly rushing past Doris to unlock the gate, and felt a disproportionate happiness, one he suspected he’d have to make an effort to conceal.

Zwelish never attacked Blondy now, his sarcasm apparently totally evaporated, and if Blondy ever experimented with a teasing joke (calling Doris “Mrs. Z”), it seemed to go right over Zwelish’s head. Or under it, as if the man were floating. They’d greet each other heartily, with or without Doris in Zwelish’s tow. It was as though Zwelish had advertised the director to Doris in advance as a sterling friend, a local pillar, and then so invested in the notion that he forgot his old wariness. Doris, when she was along, watched carefully. Her English wasn’t hopeless, once you pierced the gauze of the almost total deference she showed her husband, never speaking without checking his eyes for cues. Who knew what else she was capable of, what life she’d led before, what life she’d expected coming here. Zwelish, who worked increasingly from home, who made fewer consulting trips out of town, kept her attached at the hip.

Soon enough Doris’s pregnancy was noticeable on her scrawny frame. Her posture was too good to hide it past the third month. Zwelish accepted these congratulations, too, but distantly. This was a cold winter, everyone battened into woolen layers and readily excused from dawdling in the open, and Zwelish and his expectant young wife were more and more like figures in a snow globe, viewable but uncontactable from the human realm. They didn’t seem happy or unhappy, just curled into each other, whispering on the street, a totally opaque domestic unit. Blondy couldn’t get a rise or anything else out of Zwelish, and I knew Blondy well enough to feel how this irked him. It explained the reckless choice he made. Likely, given his history with Zwelish already, Blondy knew it was reckless, though he did it wholly in gentleness and out of sheer enthusiasm. One day when Doris was five or six months along and spring had broken out on the street, Blondy ran into her alone as she returned, waddling slightly, from the Korean market. He insisted on carrying her plastic bags to the door of the basement apartment.

This was bad enough, really, since it wasn’t beyond Zwelish’s established range to feel this as a rebuke for not having accompanied Doris to the store. But worse, much worse, at the door Blondy reached under Doris’s sweater and T-shirt, not without asking first, and cupped his palm underneath the globe that burgeoned there. He did it elegantly — nothing but elegance, with a woman especially, was possible for Blondy. Doris wasn’t jarred. Blondy didn’t linger. Just felt it and murmured something about “a miracle,” and something else about “lucky Alan.” Asked “Boy or girl?” and Doris told him: “Boy.”

Zwelish, who’d heard their voices and come to the window, now rushed out, unlocked the gate, and pulled Doris inside. He seemed to have some imprecation caught in his throat, which produced a kind of angry hiccup as he glared up at Blondy. Then, with his wife, he was gone.

Conveniently, Zwelish was alone when he next met Blondy on the street. He lowered his shoulder as they came near each other, and when Blondy said his name, he squared and delivered a sour look. “What do you want from me?” he asked Blondy. “Nothing you wouldn’t want to give” was Blondy’s reply.