A Strange Commonplace Read Free

stated: BORN TO LOVE TRAINED TO KILL. What an impossibly stupid woman she was. Well, he didn’t have to live with her. So, he’d have his Borsalino on, maybe that powder-blue tropical worsted suit he’d babied for years and years with the beautiful drape to the pants. He’d step into his Packard. That sweet young girl he’d got half-drunk with about three lifetimes ago in a bar off Gun Hill Road would be on the seat next to him in a little sun dress, a white sun dress. They’d finish what they started, oh the hell with it. What he really wanted to happen was for Warren and Blackie and Ray to disappear, for the Ridge Meadow Manor to disappear, and for himself to be as if he had never been: not to disappear, but to have never existed. Three deuces would do the trick. He looked at his cards, pushing the tight little booklet open with his thumb, card by card. The card that should have been his third deuce was a four of clubs. Ray, squinting as he laid his cards down, won, of course, with his lousy two pair. Well, all right. Tomorrow he’d try another magical route to oblivion.

In Dreams
    H E SITS ON A COUCH IN WHAT SEEMS TO BE A BORROWED or leased apartment, and a woman who, he thinks, is his wife, although she looks like a girl he knew in high school, sits next to him; a boy of six or seven sits next to her, reading Bomba the Jungle Boy. They are, he understands, in Brooklyn. The door opens and a tall and handsome young black man enters. He is wearing a dark suit, starched white shirt, small-patterned navy blue tie, and a navy blue polo coat. He carries a glistening black briefcase. He has what he says is real-estate business to discuss with the woman, and although the two speak in normal, conversational voices, and neither mutter nor whisper, nothing that they say is intelligible. The young black man leaves, smiling faintly, lewdly, and he watches him through the street-floor window, next to which is a floor-model Philco radio. The young black man pauses on the steps leading to the sidewalk, then, pulling on a pair of gray suede gloves, descends quickly and is lost to sight. He and his wife and the child rise from the couch and stand on the sidewalk. They are going to dinner, a decision made wordlessly. They are going to Manhattan to have dinner, and find themselves amid a large crowd of people heading for the subway station. He reaches into his pocket to count his change, and notices that his wife has removed her suit jacket and walks next to him in a white brassiere. He says, “You’re a real sport to do that.” The child has disappeared, a good thing, or so he thinks, but he is relieved to see that she is carrying his book, which, he now sees, is Pierre. He would like to touch her breasts, but many women in the crowd angrily warn him not to. He has ninety-nine cents, surely more than enough for the subway. He nods at his wife, who is being ogled by passing black men, and they head toward a change booth, curiously situated on the street, and, even more curiously, one that has a green-and-black Art Deco facade, as do, he well knows, most bakeries. As they approach, the change booth, he sees, is a store with an open front, much like a greengrocery. Inside the store are three Jewish men, one of whom is sitting in the shadows in the rear of the room. He has a black blanket over his legs, which appear to end at his knees. “The Holocaust,” he says, and laughs. Another man stands to the side of the room, leaning arrogantly against the wall, and the third greets him with a nod, and pulls a black watch cap over his red kinky hair. The men are disheveled, dirty, and unkempt, and the store smells of fish. He holds out his hand, the change on his palm, and asks for two tokens. He tells the man, in what he knows is a badly disguised hysteria, that he and his wife want to dine in Manhattan. The man smiles, as does the other man, still leaning against the wall. “Wife?” the man says, and he sees that his wife has returned