Sol Stein - Other people

I would have liked time to reflect on that one. "I guess," I said, "that I'm the client."

"Well. Didn't know you get yourself in trouble, George. Thought you kept your nose clean. Oh well, thousand sound too much?"

"Five hundred sounds better. And it better be something quick and good."

"Well, let's see. Amsterdam or New York?"

"New York'd be a lot easier."

"Right. Affidavit from a lady he visits about once a month."

"Straight lady?"

Fat Tarbell laughed. "Prostitute. Own brownstone. No other women. Privacy. Expensive."

"How'd you get the affidavit?"

"Listen, George, you thinking of getting disbarred and going into competition with me?"

"Not on your life."

"She got into a bad hassle with someone on the Mayor's staff. I fixed it in exchange for the affidavit. Sixteen people covered, but you're the first to put it to use. Now that I'm looking at it, George, I think five hundred's too cheap, even if it's for you."

"Five hundred to see. Seven fifty if I get to use it."

"How'll I know?"

"I'll see that you know."

"I trust you, George. You got a deal."

"Thanks. The Gristede parking lot?"

"Not this late. Come up to my place."

"I'll have a girl with me."

"Leave her in the car."

"As you say."

"How long will it take you to get here?"

"I'm still in the city. About an hour."

"Bring cash will you? I could use it tomorrow."

"Make it an hour and a half then."

"Take your time. I ain't going nowhere tonight. Bye, George."

When I went back into Widmer's office, he had his arm around Francine, and she looked like she might have been crying.

"Everything all right?" I asked.

Neither of them answered me. God, you leave a father and daughter alone together for a few minutes and what happens?

"I have to get up to Westchester fairly fast. Ned, you don't keep cash in your vault by any chance, do you? The banks are closed."

"How much?"

"Could you cash a check for five hundred?"

He nodded, disappeared for a few minutes, returned with an envelope. In my circles, he'd have handed me the money, counting it as he did so.

"It's in there," he said.

I gave him the check.

"Can I give either of you a lift to Westchester?"

Widmer shook his head.

Francine nodded at the same time.

As we left I said to Widmer, "I think I may be buying us some good news."

He had a puzzled expression on his face. I felt sorry for him. What I did for a living was sometimes fun.

"I think we're going to be able to do some interesting pretrial plea bargaining with Mr. Brady."

"Oh?" was all he said. I had a feeling that somewhere inside his vest was a little boy wanting to come along for the ride.

I am walking home from the Thalia Theater, lost in thought, imperiled by traffic, agitated not by what I have seen in the movie house, but what is going on inside my head. I think: in this neighborhood if a man walking on a block empty of people suddenly feels the clutch of a heart attack does he cry out? To whom, there is no one in the street, and the people in their apartments have immunized themselves against cries from the world outside. He slumps to the ground and dies in silence, his throat filled with the anguish of having no one to call to. However, if the same man sees one other person on the street, he calls loudly for help, hoping that one other person will come quickly. And if the same victim feels the thump of an attack in the middle of a crowded street, does he cry out for help? He knows he will be noticed by the crowd, and despite a sudden fear of immediate death, he doesn't want his reputation besmirched by being thought a coward or a crybaby. He crumbles in stoic silence. It is his environment, the circumstance of other people, that governs whether a man speaks and, to an even greater degree, what he says.

Imagine a presidential candidate addressing the nation on television, saying, "I woke in the middle of the night from a dream in which the platform I was standing on was collapsing in slow motion and I was trying to grab on to people and they were shrinking away from my grasp, not wanting to go down with me, and suddenly I was awake in bed, my pajama top drenched in cold sweat. I need your vote." Yes, but that same man lying on the couch in my darkened office tells his analyst exactly that, the dream of the night before, and reaches out for the vote of the analyst that he is, nevertheless, a rational human being, anxious and frightened that he will not win in a career where winning is everything and losing is not second best but the beginning of severe depression. He wants to be sustained by me, and he speaks in a way he never would to his wife, or closest confidants, or the world. The speeches of our life are orchestrated not by what we want to say at any given moment but by who is listening.

I think of these things as I walk home from the Thalia, where I went to see Potemkin , which I cannot bear to see on the small screen of my television and which I have not seen in a movie theater for perhaps fifteen years. I looked forward to this evening. When I sat in the lighted theater, one or two dozen people scattered among the seats, I saw that everyone else was in twos and that only I was alone. I wasn't afraid that a prostitute would come sit next to me or a man cruising would mistake me for an aging homosexual. It is only when the lights dim and the movie comes on that I suddenly feel that such occasions call for an audience of at least two. The other people in the theater have brought their own companionship. I cannot at a moment of recognition on the screen turn to Marta to see if she is reacting as well, or nudge her with my elbow, a touch of shared experience. I am too conscious of myself. One person is an insufficient audience for a motion picture. I feel a wave of anxiety. I am half an audience.

The picture had hardly started, I was just getting used to squinting at the English subtitles when the impulse to see Potemkin again is overriden by the knowledge that movies are not to be seen alone, they exaggerate the loneliness, the inappropriateness of solitary viewing, the not being part of an audience within the audience. I must leave.

The ticket taker looks at me. After all, it is crazy to spend three dollars to be admitted and then to leave, he thinks I came on the wrong night, that I wanted to see another film, that I will demand to have my money returned, all this I see in his expression as I go by, demanding not money or anything else but the chance to leave and, walking home, to think of the man having a heart attack in the street, and that I have been a fool among fools to have abjured a lasting companionship since Malta's death. The newsstands on Broadway shout at me with their pornographic magazines, the great behinds and breasts visible from a distance, barking at lonely men by the millions.

I remember the first time I saw the inside of such a magazine, on the coffee table of my waiting room. I was certain it was not there before Shenker arrived, therefore Shenker must have left it. I turn the pages. The central attraction seems to be the orifices of women, some tight-mouthed as in life, some pink lips within lips, open and moist. One looks up and these orifices belong to faces that reduce one's incipient erection to instant disappointment, faces not guided by an interior intelligence, or even a sensible look, but a put-on petulance or a talentless simulacrum of passion. Did Shenker leave this as a sign that at the age of forty-two he is no longer cringingly afraid of a female body, or something much simpler, that this distinguished biochemist has at long last reached the stage where he can masturbate to orgasm without guilt and is now ready for the next step, to develop a relationship with another person? For Shenker it would be a triumph! I cannot leave this magazine on the table, I put it away in a drawer in my study. Is it to study my reaction to it once again? I look and I am forming analyses of each of the women in my head, a ridiculous exercise. A rose is a rose, but to me the vagina is a flower with a stem that leads straight up the spinal cord to the brain. When Shenker comes the next time I hand him the magazine and say "I believe you left this." He says "It's not mine," and I know I have lost him for another year of circumlocutions and evasions of the fact that his mother taught him to despise his sexuality as she despised hers.