The Tenants by Bernard Malamud

Author:Bernard Malamud
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

As Lesser leaves the last gallery, wondering what would happen if he went home and picked up his pen, a blue-hatted black woman in the lobby drops a mirror out of her cloth handbag and it shatters on the floor. A girl in a voluminous silk-lined black cape coming out of the ladies’ room quickly walks away from it. Lesser, stooping, hands the black woman a large triangular sliver of glass. In it he sees himself, unshaven, gloomy, gaunt; it comes from not writing. The black woman spits on the fragment of mirror Lesser has given her. He backs off. Lesser hurries after the girl in the cape into the street. He had often thought of her, sometimes while writing.

“Shalom,” he says in the street.

She looks at him oddly, coldly. “Why do you say that?”

He fumbles, says he isn’t sure. “I never use the word.”

Irene, a moody type, walks in noisy boots along the slushy sidewalk, going towards Sixth Avenue, Lesser walking along with her, surprised to be though he invents surprises of this sort easily enough in his fiction. She moves with a loose-limbed, slightly pigeon-toed stride, wearing a knitted green wool hat from which her hair pours down her back. Her intricate earrings clink faintly. Lesser is thinking of her as she looked at his party——her short thick skirt and pink blouse, her plump white breasts; of looking up her legs to the conjoining thighs. He remembers her dance with Bill he hadn’t been able to break into.

She’s a black man’s girl, they’re a special breed. I’m on my way home.

“How about coffee?” Irene asks.

He says fine.

They sit at a counter. She holds the hot cup with both hands to warm her nail-bitten fingers. Her eyes are evenly green and blue. Her black hair, in daylight, is golden blond.

Lesser, as they drink their coffee, waits as though expecting a confession but she makes none.

He tries to breathe in her perfume but the scent is hidden. Behind the ears? Under her long cape? In her sweaty armpits? Between breasts or legs? He has made the grand tour but hasn’t sniffed flowers. No gardenia, no garden.

“Don’t you have a girl?”

He asks why she asks.

“You had nobody for yourself at your party.”

“The last girl I had was about a year ago. I had one the summer before that. They get impatient waiting for me to finish my book.”

“Willie says it’s taking forever.”

“I’m a slow writer. It’s my nature.”

She smiles sourly.

“Let’s get out of here,” Lesser says.

They walk up Sixth to the park, dirty with melting snow, the pale dead grass on hard ground visible in dark circles under trees. They stand by the low stone wall on Fifty-ninth, overlooking the snowy meadow. The park is of diminished reality to Lesser, tight, small, remote. The book he is writing is unbearably real in his thoughts. What am I doing so far away from it? What am I doing here on a working day in the middle of winter?

“When do you laugh?” she says.

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