J. Cunningham - Comfort Station

He briefly reconsidered the janitor, the fellow who spent most of his time in the closet and who had made some sort of oddball overture a couple of hours ago. Put the nab on him after all? It wasn’t as though the janitor — custodian, they liked to be called, as he remembered — didn’t have a legitimate right to be here. But on the other hand, think of the psychological implications: why would a man choose a job in a place like this?

Arbogast cleared his throat with a sudden uneasiness, remembering that he too had opted for a job that had led him here.

All right, he’d leave the custodian alone for now. But if nothing else came up in the course of the day, it might not be a bad idea to put the nab on the custodian just to show the people downtown — at headquarters — that he, Arbogast Smith, was actually doing something around here.

In the meantime, he took a little walk around the area, counting shoes. There were still no more than two to be seen under the door of any stall. Unfortunate.

But the regulars were still here. He remembered them well, having observed each of them as he had entered his stall, keeping a mental file of their appearance in case he should ever need to know what any of them looked like. It was a cop kind of thing to do.

In Stall Number 1 was a nervous, middle-aged, balding sort of fellow with a satchel, an accountant type. He’d been in there since around nine o’clock this morning.

In Stall Number 2 was some kind of long-haired hippie with a valpack. He’d been there since around ten.

And in Stall Number 5 was a stocky foreign-looking fellow with a pencil moustache, who’d showed up a little before lunch.

It was awful to have bowel problems. Arbogast knew; they ran in his family. He shook his head with sympathy for the three sufferers in the stalls.

But each of the three was still alone, and therefore not Arbogast Smith’s official concern. Turning away, he ambled slowly toward the sinks, his mind turning to thoughts of the long trail that had led him, from his mother’s knee, to this very spot.

It was a long time ago that he remembered his mother got the phone call ...

Lance Cavendish strode westward on 42nd Street, eyes flashing in his dark-hued face as he surveyed the scene. Rain rained, drenching the already-drenched city, but Lance was well protected within his Bill Blass raincoat and his Italia boots. His Afro hairdo, sculptured in the shape of a flamingo standing on one foot, was tucked away protectively under his Christian Dior hat, and his sensitive hands were protected by buff gloves from Countess Mara.

Like most Americans of African descent, Lance Cavendish was a Renaissance man, whose cool humor and good competence were a legend where’er he would wander. Having finished the architectural plans for the new Black Studies Center at Yeshiva University earlier than anticipated, Lance had taken time out from his busy schedule to present to the New York Public Library the original manuscript sheet music of his “Separate But Equal Cantata,” a defense of community control of neighborhood schools from which the pupils have been bussed, and was now on his way to the West Side Airlines Terminal, whence he would delimousine and deplane for Washington, D.C., to return to his seat in Congress, where he had a vital speech to deliver on offshore fishing rights before hastening off yet once more; he was to open in Las Vegas’ Sahara Hotel in just three days and was still to decide whether to appear as a singer or a comedian.

Now, striding westward on 42nd Street, humming his cantata while mentally composing a sonnet to the memory of Leadbelly, Lance Cavendish observed the rain splashing onto the sidewalk, running waterily in the gutter, spattering on the passing traffic, dribbling down the front of his own raincoat, and an expression of inner unease touched his handsome brown face. Looking about, he spied ahead through the splashing rain the stony contours of the Bryant Park Comfort Station, and his level amused eyes lit up in an expression of anticipatory relief. His stride increased in length, and purposefulness, and his eyes fairly sparkled.

But then, as the Comfort Station came closer, the expression in Lance Cavendish’s clear-seeing eyes grew more doubtful. Can it be ? those piercing eyes seemed to say.

Lance Cavendish came to a stop on the sidewalk in front of the building. His keen vision observed the oval window in the street side wall, observed the entrance over on the right, even observed the statue up in Bryant Park behind the Comfort Station: a green-garbed green man in a frock coat, leaning on a book on a pedestal, holding what appears to be a bag of peanuts in his hands.

(Had Lance Cavendish looked carefully at the north face of this statue’s base, he would have seen the following inscription:

And had he, further, looked carefully at the inscription on the south face of the base, Lance Cavendish would have discovered that the person represented hereon was none other than the far-seeing William Earl Dodge, beloved of millions. Lance Cavendish didn’t look, however; he was otherwise engaged.)

After having fully observed the street side of the Bryant Park Comfort Station, Lance Cavendish strode to the park entrance just to the right of the Comfort Station and slowly but stridingly made a complete circuit of the building, going all the way around it and then coming all the way back around again in the opposite direction, until once more he was standing on the sidewalk in front of the cold gray building.

There was no entrance for him .

Lance Cavendish shuffled away.

The hours crawled by for Carolina Weiss, former Russian countess now A & E mechanic, every hour seeming to last sixty minutes. Sitting in Stall Number 2 at the Bryant Park Comfort Station, crossroads of a million private lives, she wiled away the wily hours by alternating reflections on the events which had led her here to this place at this time with speculations on what had become of Roland, who was to meet her here at this place at this time, but who had not as yet put in an appearance: the whole leavened with a soupçon of general philosophic commentary on the overall subject of relations, both marital and extra.

Who was it who said the bourgeoisie, having solved all the real problems of human life, had to invent adultery to keep from dying of boredom? Well, no matter: it doesn’t sound like someone we’d care to invite to the house anyway, so who cares what his name is? (The driver’s name! Arbogast Smith’s driver, from 8:00 A.M. Elwood Tripe, that was it! Elwood Tripe. All facts eventually rise, like corpses, to the surface.)

When Carolina Weiss began to reflect back upon her past, it was perfectly true that she had a past well worth reflecting back on. Born to an aristocratic Russian family still living in their beloved mother country years after the Communist overlords had begun to lord it over their unhappy nation, Carolina and her parents and brothers and sisters had managed for years to hide their nobility by overeating. It was Carolina who, at the age of nine, inadvertently gave the game away. Her class taking a compulsory tour of a nationalized mattress factory, Carolina had slipped and fallen from a catwalk, falling a scant two feet and landing on a pile of twenty superthick mattresses. No one thought anything of the incident, except that Carolina complained bitterly that something sharp had dug into her hip when she’d landed on the top mattress. The factory foreman announced this to be impossible, and patted the mattress all over to demonstrate that there was nothing sharp or hard within it. Nevertheless, the child continued to weep and to complain, and her teacher noticed a large bruise beginning to form on the youngster’s hip. The foreman, puzzled, had the top mattress taken apart by factory employees: it contained no foreign matter. Very well, he would have the second mattress taken apart, and then the third, and then the fourth ...