The Fortress of Solitude Read Free Page A

Dylan who instead worked Rachel’s margins, dodging her main force to dip sidelong into what he could make sense of. He might creep downstairs to slink at her shelves, in the shadows, under the nudes. There he could pretend to consider her books— Tropic of Cancer , Kon-Tiki , Letting Go , Games People Play —his eyes blurring while he eavesdropped on her calls, calls,“. . . he’s upstairs . . . California never mattered . . . paying all the bills . . . said the texture of the mushrooms reminded me of something and he turned bright red . . . playing that Clapton record at four in the morning . . . completely lost my French . . .” Alternately, Dylan tiptoed close under the cover of Rachel’s monologue, thinking it was another phone call, to find someone seated at her table instead, drinking iced tea, sharing Rachel’s ashtray, laughing, listening, detecting Dylan’s footfalls which Rachel had ignored.
    “There he is,” they’d say, as if Dylan were always the topic just abandoned.
    Then he was beckoned to the table to be met. Dylan would recall the visitors only as Rachel described them later, to Abraham at dinner: the not-brilliant folksinger who’d opened for Bobby Dylan once and wouldn’t let you forget it, the horny yippie who faced prosecution for stuffing subway turnstiles with slugs, the rich homosexual who collected art but wouldn’t buy one of Abraham’s nudes because they were women, the radical black minister from Atlantic Avenue who had to scrutinize everyone new in the neighborhood, the old boyfriend who now worked as a piano tuner at Carnegie Hall but might join the Peace Corps to keep out of Vietnam, the Gurdjieff-quoting English couple on their way to bicycle across Mexico, the woman from the Brooklyn Heights consciousness-raising group who just couldn’t believe they’d bought on Dean Street. So many of them, all reaching for Dylan’s head to muss his hair and ask why Rachel let it grow into his eyes, grow to his shoulders. Dylan looked like a girl—that was agreed on by pretty much everyone.
    Then—and this was finally always the essential problem with floating downstairs—Rachel would stir from her chair, cigarette in her fingers, and usher Dylan to the front door, point out the children playing on the sidewalk, insist that he join them. Rachel had a program, a plan. She had grown up a Brooklyn street kid and so would Dylan. And so she’d eject him from the first of his two worlds, the house, into the second. The outside, the block. Dean Street.
     
    The second world was an arrangement of zones in slate, and the peeling painted fronts of the row houses—pink, white, pale green, various tones of red and blue, always giving way to the brick underneath—those were the flags of undiscovered realms which lay behind and probably determined the system of slate zones. As far as Dylan could tell no kid ever went into another’s home. They didn’t talk about their parents either. Dylan knew nothing else to talk about, and so drifted silently into the group of children, who seemed to understand this, and vaguely parted their ranks to make room for him. Maybe every kid had drifted in this way.
    Nevins and Bond Streets, which bracketed the block at either end, were vents into the unknown, routes to the housing projects down on Wyckoff Street. Anyway, the Puerto Rican men in front of the bodega on Nevins owned the corner. Another group, black men mostly, lingered in the doorway of a rooming house between the Ebduses’ and Isabel Vendle’s, and they would shoo away the ball-playing boys, yelling at them to watch out for the windshield of a car forever parked in front of the rooming house, a Stingray, which one Puerto Rican man with a waxed mustache frequently polished and rarely drove. Finally, a mean black man who glared but never spoke broomed the slate and scissored weeds in front of two houses close to Bond Street. So the children of Dean Street instinctively bunched in the middle of the