A Week as Andrea Benstock

A dingy narrow building on Perry west of Seventh, five floors, two apartments to the floor, the stairwell full of cooking smells. His apartment was three flights up. They climbed the old stairs without speaking, he leading the way, and he opened the door with his key and stood aside to let her enter.

There was a police lock, a heavy steel bar that fitted into a steel plate on the floor and braced against the door. “That’s new,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

“Got it a couple of years ago. I got sick of having junkies coming around and kicking the door in. They never found anything much to take but I resented the intrusion. A man likes his privacy, don’t you know.”

“You always did like your privacy.”

“Saloons exist to serve the needs of private people. There’s an eternal truth for you, Andrea. Hurry and write it down.”

“Won’t you use it in a book sometime?”

“If I remember, and if it still sounds good to me when the time comes. Drink?”

“No thanks.”

While he poured Glenfiddich scotch into a glass she took the measure of the apartment. It seemed to be more or less as she remembered it. She had not been to his place that many times. Half a dozen? And how many times had he come to her place on Jane Street? Eight, ten times?

Hardly a grand passion.

She lit a cigarette. The apartment did seem the same, and yet she was conscious now as she had not been previously that it was small — a single long narrow room with a tiny stove and refrigerator in one corner, a long wall of jerrybuilt bookshelves, a fireplace the flue of which was permanently stopped up, a threadbare maroon rug, third- and fourth- and fifth-hand upholstered chairs, a convertible sofa, its arms scarred by neglected cigarettes, which he opened into a bed if he had overnight company but slept on unopened if he was alone.

She was aware of the smallness now, and of the shabbiness, as she had been aware of the sour odors of the building while they climbed the stairs.

And yet—

“Here it is.”

She took the book from him, held it in both hands, turned it over to regard his photograph on the back cover. “It’s a good picture, Jack.”

“Considering what they had to work with.”

“Where was it taken? The Head?”

He nodded. “Leaning on the bar with a glass in my hand. The consensus was that my friends wouldn’t recognize me in any other surroundings. You sure I can’t get you a drink? There’s beer in the icebox.”

“I’m positive. ‘In Love with Crazy Jane.’ Where’d you get the title?”

“It’s a reference to Yeats.”

“Oh, the Crazy Jane poems. Right.”

“It’s the usual kind of crap. It asks the age-old question — can a Mick from Bay Ridge possibly contend with the human condition if some bastard makes the mistake of teaching him to read and write? And it comes back with the usual answer.”

“Which is?”

“You have to read the book to find out.”

She sat down on the couch, the book in her hands. She read the cover blurb without really paying attention to what she was reading, letting her eyes scan the column without their registering what they saw. After a moment or two he sat down beside her, reading over her shoulder.

“Autobiographical, Jack?”

“A little. Be better if it was. More honest. But you know me, I can’t tell a story without trying to improve it, so I turned the truth around and put in things that happened to friends of mine, or things I heard about, or things I made up altogether. There’s a lot of Catholic bullshit and a lot of Village bullshit and a certain amount of political bullshit, but not too much of the last because I got sick of it.”

“Aren’t you active in politics these days?”

“I go through the motions now and then but it takes a lot of effort. Dallas took all the fun out of it.” He emptied his glass and set it down heavily on the steamer trunk that served as a coffee table. Other glasses had bleached white rings on the lid of the trunk, and cigarettes had left scars. “The hell of it is that I never really thought that much of the son of a bitch. But you have to give him one thing. The deader he is, he better he looks. And the war goes on.”