Читаем Fall and Rise полностью

“I’m sorry about what happened back there. Any damage done to your cab, not that much could have been—”

“Is nothing. Not my cab. Forget, forget,” still angry.

He has an accent, kind of a high Russian voice, I look at his hack license: Jascha Papinsky. “Vy—excuse me—vy Russki, da?”

“Da,” smiling, “you speak?”

“Just those few words I learned at a party tonight, which I think are the same few words I learned at this same person’s party last year. There were a number of novy Amerikanets there. You the same? New?”

“No understand.”

“The Soviet Union. Have you recently come from there?”

“Novy. Here. Yes. One year. Engineer. Too bad you not speak. I want to speak Russian for hours, but all Russian émigrés in New York is drivers of taxi, no riders. And old Russians many years here no more take taxi or look my name and to me not speak. Ah, my English very bad. A big problem. Adres. Take.”

He drives me to my building. For the whole ride from a tape deck beside him is some slow old jazz which I sit back and listen to and get to like. “Please wait till I’m in my building,” I say, paying him. “And if you could also be so nice. Since this neighborhood sometimes isn’t safe. Wait till I wave to you from inside my building before you go? Understand?”

“Sure thing. Glad to.”

I have my keys out and leave the cab, unlock the lobby door, go in, look around, let the door close, ring for the elevator, and when it comes, look at the convex mirror on its wall to make sure no one’s hiding inside. I wave to the driver, who beeps once, and take the elevator to my floor.

Sammy is speaking to me from behind the door second I step off the elevator. Sue had to be put to sleep because the pain from her terminal cancer was getting too great. I didn’t tell Peter because he knew how close I was to my cats and how close they were to each other and by that time I didn’t want his sympathy, genuine or false. “Okay, Sams, I’m coming — don’t fly out the door.” Elevator closes, so even if he does run past me he can’t get into the elevator, which he did once and it took me a while to find what floor he ended up on. I open the door, he’s scratching the floor that he wants to jump up. I put down the bags, wiggle my fingers for him to come and he stares at my stomach while he hums and then jumps at the spot he stared at and making squealing sounds runs up my chest till he’s lying across my shoulder, purring, head against my cheek. I walk into the kitchen with him, set him down, he’s finished his food and is pushing the plate with his forehead for more. I open a jar of strained-veal baby food and spoon two globs of it onto his plate, leave the spoon on the plate because he likes to lick it, drink a glass of seltzer, undress, shower, take two aspirins, brush my teeth and floss them and massage the gums with the brush’s rubber tip and get into bed. That’s it with parties for me, at least for a month, even if it is the season. Write that down. I jump out of bed — Sammy, sleeping next to me, gets startled and jumps off the bed and runs out of the room — get my appointment calendar and write on December’s four pages a letter a day with “onth” on the 31st: “No more parties for me at least for a month.” And at the bottom of the last page: “Meet people instead for breakfast or lunch, read for and outline spring term, finish 30pp of the book, just finish the book! try not to even see a man after 5 except maybe new year’s eve, and even there, but who’ll that be? — Oh, no woes if you stay home alone that night and on great wine and black forest ham and poached salmon fillets get high.”

I’m reading a student’s paper on “Postconstructionism and Morphology in the Postmodern American Novel”—I’m sure he has the first term wrong, if he’s not sending up that critical school, and even if he is, the entire department by now, students and teachers both, has to know how I hate those words and themes, even parodies of them, since there’s rarely anything in them for me except material and writing to help put me to sleep when I can’t sleep — when the phone rings. Answering service closed more than two hours ago. I don’t like answering it, as at this hour there’s a good chance it’s a crank. “Yes?”

“Then you got home okay. Good. I was worrying.”

“Who is this?”

“Excuse me, because why should I have thought you’d recognize my voice? Arthur Rosenthal. And excuse me too for calling so late.”

“Thanks for your concern, Arthur, but it’s too late to even talk about it being too late.”

“Now I’m very sorry I called. I didn’t think it’d be that late — late italicized I mean. Because I called only fifteen minutes ago—”

“You couldn’t have. I’ve been home more than half an hour.”

“I did. And a half-hour before that, and a half-hour before that too. Maybe I just missed you the second half-hour ago and you were someplace else the last half-hour — in another room, am I wrong?”

“It’s possible I was in the shower then and didn’t hear it, so all right. Still—”