We, Too, Must Love by Ann Aldrich

Author:Ann Aldrich [Aldrich, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558619340
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

10. THE MEN IN THEIR LIVES

1. Joe Forrini . . .

You’ve seen Joe before. You have seen him eating dinner in the Automat around six in the evening, sitting up by a window where he can watch the street, or sitting at the table facing the door where he can search the faces of the people coming and going, and listen to the bits of conversation at the tables around him. Joe knows the regulars in there just as well as the man at the tobacco counter on the corner knows that Joe smokes Camels, and after dinner buys a pack, and pays a penny for a mint, chocolate-coated and wrapped in tin foil.

You’ve seen Joe on a bench in the park, reading his newspaper or working the crossword puzzle, or simply watching again—always watching other people.

You’ve seen him in line at the local movie house; seen him in the neighborhood bar nursing a beer and watching television; seen him at the neighborhood store buying fruit to munch on in his room; and seen him from your vantage spot on the street—an anonymous-looking figure up above you in his rented room, wandering about in the glare of the naked electric light bulb that hangs by a cord from the ceiling.

You’ve never known his name or anything about him, but you have seen the Joes of Manhattan and wondered at their lives, guessed at their loneliness, and pondered the reasons for life’s leaving them out—these men who are almost old and very much alone.

Joe Forrini doesn’t know the reasons himself. He cannot account for himself or for what his life has become, any more than he can account for the fact that somewhere in his late twenties he began to take on weight in unusual amounts, he began to lose hair; he began to become more and more absorbed in the newspapers, reading sometimes four or five a day; he began to avoid paying visits to his old neighborhood down on Mulberry Street—where his parents had lived until their death; and he began to stop writing his brother Louie, out in California.

Joe Forrini is fifty-eight now. He’s as fat as ever, and totally bald. He works as a printer’s assistant, and lives a few blocks from where he works, on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village. In his furnished room there are few personal possessions save for the obvious—clothing, shaving equipment, and a milk bottle in which he saves pennies. Last Christmas his only card was from a liquor store down the street which he patronizes off and on, for jugs of cheap wine to sip on those nights sleep comes slowly.

Until February, Joe led the kind of routine meaningless existence that neither depresses nor elates someone as resigned as Joe. In life, Joe was just there—plodding along, noting now and then that yesterday’s temperature set a record high, and that they were certainly tearing down a lot of old buildings in the Washington Square area. His disappointments were minor ones—the Automat

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