Written by Mel Reichler and Jim Egan
Copyright 2002
The Man With
The Ladder Stories II
One sunny afternoon, the Man with the Ladder found himself perched on his ladder surrounded by his friends near his favorite bench in his favorite park. Each of them had intended to be somewhere else, but the sunny beauty of the day had commanded them to break appointments, renege on obligations, and set aside intentions and go to the park.
Reb Dunzel and Timothy Michael huddled on a bench arguing, and the Man with the Ladder, sitting on the bottom rung of his ladder, was mediating the debate. Mediating was pleasant and easy because the debaters were pre-occupied with absorbing as much sun and fresh air as they could get and neither of them knew much about the subject they were arguing about. In the midst of a pause in the discussion, Tatanya Schwartz—almost forgotten at the foot of the Ladder—suddenly interrupted.
“The Man with the Ladder isn’t your real name is it?” she asked, with an innocent but intent look.
Reb Dunzel and Timothy Michael froze on the bench. It was a question that neither had dared ask when they had first met the Man with the Ladder and, having come to know him they had felt their familiarity made it awkward to ask it later. They had waited patiently for someone else to broach the subject but it had never come up—until now. They tried not to seem too interested in his response, but their argument collapsed. The park itself seemed to grow quiet as if all of its occupants were now holding their breath to hear how he answered the little girl’s question.
“No, not the way you mean it.” said the Man with the Ladder taking a deep breath, “It was not the name my parents gave me.” His friends had heard the Man with the Ladder talked about, and gossiped about, and rumored about with many names and aliases but no one—to their knowledge— had ever asked him to his face what his real name was. The quietness of the park and the stillness of the people around her unsettled the little girl and she paused awkwardly before her next question.
The Man with the Ladder sensed her uncertainty and confided to her softly, “The name my parents gave me was quite an ordinary name, and like their own, pretty much arbitrarily chosen when I was born and they didn’t know me really. It took thirty years before I earned a name that was truly my own, and though it’s not a particularly glamorous name, it is unique and mine and was given to me without prejudice or forethought from the people I come in contact with everyday. It’s the realest name I have.”
Even though it seemed like the Man with the Ladder was not going to reveal his given name Reb Dunzel and Timothy Michael breathed out quietly. Their hope lingered for a moment as Tatanya prepared to summon up another question.
“Would you give me a name of my own?” she asked with a mischievous glint in her eyes.
“How about Miss Nonstop Questions?”
“I don’t like that name.”
“It doesn’t matter if you like it or not, it only matters if it fits you or you fit it.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?” asked Miss Nonstop Questions.
“Oh no,” the Man with the Ladder said, shaking his head solemnly, “For instance, `the Man with the Ladder’ is a name that fit me the minute someone spoke it, but I have had other names that I’ve tried to fit but they just never fit me.”
“You’re going to tell us a story aren’t you?” Tatanya squealed with delight, “He’s going to tell a story now!” she announced to everyone in ear shot.
“Well as a matter of fact there is a story I could tell right about now if someone wouldn’t try so hard to live up to her new name.”
“He’s talking about me.” Tatanya decided out loud. “Okay, I promise.”
“One afternoon,” the Man with the Ladder began, “I was here in the park minding my own business when a stranger strides right up to the foot of my ladder and says with a big smile, “Hello Derrick!”
“I’m sorry, my name is not Derrick,” I told him.
“Oh, but you look exactly like a Derrick. You’re quite sure, I suppose.”
“Oh yes, I’d probably be the first to know.”
“What makes it so hard to believe is that you’re so tall and well spoken. You are well spoken aren’t you?”
“Well, I suppose so.”
“Unique, charming at times, confident but diplomatic?”
“I’d like to think so,” I admitted.
“Well then there you go,” the stranger said, “a Derrick.”
“You don’t have to be named Derrick to be any of those things,” I insisted.
“Well if you insist your name isn’t Derrick,” the stranger said, piqued, “then what is it?”
“People call me the Man with the Ladder.”
The stranger rudely burst out laughing, “Derrick, you’re such a kidder. You had me going there. You have a wonderful sense of humor.”
“Thank you, but I’m not joking, that’s my name.” I twisted my ladder around to face him with my namesake.
The man shrugged. “You were better off as Derrick,” he announced, turning around and heading off.
I decided I had enough of strangers in the park for one day and was about to hoist my ladder on my shoulder and set off when I ran into Utei, the painter on air, being followed by a whole pride of cats and kittens. Every so often as he walked he would spray a misty patch of paint toward the ground. Before it would hit the pavement, it would swirl around making little darting motions, like a school of fish, and his little followers would pounce on the illusion, chasing the spirals into one another until there was a tangle of paws and tails and kitten noses where the pseudo fish had once swam.
“And humans think they enjoy art,” he chuckled at the furry pile of pussycats. The air seemed to be tinged with the smell of salmon. Before I could ask about it, Utei turned to me and asked, “Is it my imagination or you taller today?”
I laughed, “It’s funny you should say that because a perfect stranger just walked up to me and not only said I was tall but confident and charming as well.”
Utei looked me over carefully, “I’m no perfect stranger but you do look more confident, more self-possessed. Perhaps new hair cut?”
“No, I haven’t been near the barber. But listen to this, the stranger insisted on calling me Derrick.”
“Hmm, you do look like a Derrick, though I never noticed before. Until you mentioned it I wouldn’t have thought I even knew what a Derrick looked like, but then there you are,” he said, nodding in my direction. As he spoke, his audience grew more impatient and were slowly but surely climbing up the folds of his robe trying to make their way up his sleeve.
“I have to go now,” he announced, “If I don’t keep moving my adoring fans will probably eat me.”
I sat there trying to imagine what a Derrick might look like. I concluded that whatever he looked like it was most likely a little too urbane and sophisticated for my taste. I realized must have been staring blankly across the playground because, when I focused my attention on what was in front of me, a stunningly attractive woman was staring back at me from the bench just across from me.
I assumed that my staring must have seemed like a rude assault, so I turned my head and got up quickly to avoid a scene, but as I was turning to go, out of the corner of my eye I saw the woman smile and wink at me. My body had already started to turn and the momentum of the ladder pulled me one way, and my incredulous eyes pulled me back in disbelief. Just as I was certain I was about to lose my balance and topple, ladder and all, on the well dressed lady’s’s lap—when something seemed to rally my muscles, and, with a deft spin I was seated not twelve inches from the most beautiful woman I had ever seen up close.
“Nice move.” she purred. I looked into her face. It was like a work of art. In place of mere eyes she had deep blue crystals and her lips were moist and slightly pursed as if preparing for a kiss—the more I looked, the more I felt my jaw tightening. I couldn’t speak and I prepared myself for the worst.
There is a moment in everyone’s life where events seem to take on monumental significance. At that moment either you drop the ball or you run with it. Whatever the outcome, we carry that moment around on instant replay for the rest of our lives. Mine was going to be of me sitting in the bleachers as a ball flew past me, sailing slowly enough to count stiches and grasp easily between a thumb and pinky, and me not even reaching out to try to catch it: this beautiful woman, the wink, my speechlessness.
Just then a confidant called from the noisy turmoil of my mind. `Stop being your old bumbling self’, it seemed to say, `You look like a Derrick, why not act like one?’ I was willing to try; if anyone was going to drop the ball it might as well be Derrick—anyone but the me I had to live with.
“Hello,” I said, my voice sounding surprisingly confident, “My name is Derrick.”
She seemed surprised, almost self-conscious, “I never met a Derrick before. My name is Martha.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“No it’s a plain name, I never liked it. I guess someone like yourself with a name like Derrick wouldn’t understand, but I’ve always wanted to be called Melinda.”
“You look like a Melinda.”
“You think so?” she asked shyly.
“As surely as my name is Derrick.”
“You’re very sweet, I can tell. I meet clever, handsome men all the time but they’re not graceful like you. She paused for a moment.
“I’d love to travel exotic places and ride an impulse to wild, romantic adventures, but it’s harder for a woman, especially since I’m not glib and resourceful.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” I scoffed, “a Melinda who wasn’t quick and resourceful?”
She looked past me into the park. “I’m sure you’ve had wild romantic adventures in exotic places.”
“I’ve had a few,” I admitted, “but nothing to speak about.”I must have blushed.
“You are too modest,” she said sweetly. “Sweeping women off their feet must bed second nature to you.” She hesitated. ”Lets say my name was Melinda and I put you on the spot and said, sweep me off my feet, what would you do?”
`Quake in my boots’ was the first answer that occurred to me. I
had to think fast but my imagination struggled to come up with a something that
a Derrick would do. Certainly not pool or bowling.
Maybe dining or dancing. I seriously considered the Hungarian Festival on
Unlike Derrick, I had never been to
“Ohh Derrick, you’re a dream come true. Ordinary men would have
offered dining or dancing or worse, that Hungarian Festival on
After we left the park the rest of the evening was an exciting
blur of activities that only Derrick would think of, at places few besides
Derrick would go. Derrick danced and sang and why we didn’t end up in
“Last night was wonderful, Derrick,” the voice thundered at me.
“I wish I remembered more of it. Tell me Melinda, what happened after the belly dancers and elephants…”
“My name isn’t Melinda. This is Stacy.”
“Stacy?”
“Is this Derrick? You don’t sound like Derrick.” The voice changed from a purr to an accusing whine.
“No, no, Derrick is out,
“Oh, just like Derrick to be in gay Pari. So you’re Derrick’s friend,” she said suddenly interested again, “what’s your name?”
“The Man with the Ladder.”
“Oh.” then an awkward silence, “Well don’t forget to tell Derrick I called.” The phone went dead.
To avoid any further embarrassing repercussions from Derrick I decided to rid myself of him that very morning.
“Hello Derrick!” I warmly greeted the first person I passed on the street that morning. He was a tall slim man in a business suit and he looked enough like Derrick for the name to stick. Puzzled, he turned to face me but I was already past him, leaving him to live the Derrick life for a while.
Derrick undoubtedly lives on in someone else’s shoes, probably
dancing in
“How would you like to be Derrick for a day?” the Man with the Ladder asked Tatanya upon completion of his tale.
“I’d rather be Queen Motifa,” the little girl replied without hesitation.
A man jogging past suddenly called out, “Hey Alfonse, nice ladder you got there—What’s the matta’, your cat up a tree or somethin’?” The Man with the Ladder winced.
Queen Motifa tugged on the side of his trousers, “Hey Alfonse, how about getting me a soda?”
Reb and Timothy Michael had themselves a good laugh over the Man with the Ladder’s new baptism, and while they were deciding what names they would like to don, the Man with the Ladder clung to his ladder tightly and heard a name, his name, echo loudly in his ears.
The Man with the Ladder was in the park sitting on the grass with Reb Dunzel and his wife, Sister Greb. Couples paraded around them, flashing love like a badge, and knots of young men and women unravelled and re-tangled exploring every possible twist to see if it would hold together under the weak gravity of flirtation. The wind lapped around them and the day was engorged like a sponge with spring and love.
Over Reb Dunzel’s shoulder the Man with the Ladder watched a clown putting on a show for a tiny audience who gave him their attention fitfully. The clown, following a crease in the grass, pretended to be walking a tightrope carelessly taut over the center of a circus ring. He was alternatively defiant and vulnerable, one minute completely buoyed up by the love laden air around him, nonchalant, challenging the rope to snake up and hurl him to the ground, the next, anxious and defensive, as if the slightest miscalculation meant a netless plunge down a spiraling staircase of air to a hard, bare, circus ring floor. The Man with the Ladder was impressed by the performance.
“Why are you so edgy?” Reb Dunzel asked. He had surrendered to the day completely. “It’s a wonderful day. Love is in the air.” He looked at his wife concerned that she might get the wrong idea but, like the Man with the Ladder, she held the day lightly away from her and let it dangle. “Love is in the air,” Reb Dunzel repeated again. “Why are you two so detached and guarded?” he asked.
“It’s the day,” his wife said.
“The day is wonderful,” Reb Dunzel exclaimed, “Love is in the air, can’t you feel it?”
“I can,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I feel it. It’s wonderful”—he relaxed as he turned toward Reb Dunzel and then tightened up immediately, as if he was on guard against something that might suddenly leap and devour him—“and terrible.” He watched the clown who, taking his eyes off of the imaginary rope, surveyed the crowd and realized his audience was unconvinced. The audience’s aloofness made him sweat and his makeup began to run.
“What’s terrible about love,” Reb Dunzel wanted to know. “It’s wonderful.”
The Man with the Ladder shuddered. “Love is wonderful and terrible. Always both.”
Sister Greb nodded.
“You don’t fool me, you two,” Reb Dunzel said. “You can act withdrawn and indifferent,” he said, “but I know you. You are romantics, of all the people in the world you two are most open to loving.”
“I know about love,” Sister Greb said. “My former profession was all about loving. Today I have only you to love, but yesterday I had the whole world and God,” she said with what seemed to her companions something of an ambivalent sigh. “Loving you is a full time job. Imagine what work loving everything takes.”
“Tell me how love is terrible,” Reb Dunzel demanded, watching a couple wend their way through the park completely engrossed in one another. “I mean these days you have to worry about harassment charges… . I know that is a bother for people asymettrically in love but otherwise… look at that couple.” As he watched the pair tripped over a homeless man because they were looking at each other not where they were walking.
“Love is wonderful in uncountable ways and, in each way it is wonderful, by some awful symmetry of the world, it’s terrible also,” Sister Greb said.
Before Reb Dunzel could ask again how love was terrible, the Man with the Ladder turned to him. “I have regards,” he said.
“From whom?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“Remember the actor?”
Reb Dunzel took a moment to shake himself free of the couple in love. “Yes. I haven’t seen him recently.”
“You might have,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“What do you mean?
“I met him the other day here in the park. I was sitting on the ladder when a sallow faced man with stringy hair that rippled down his face like spaghetti came up to me. From a distance I could not identify him, but when he got close I recognized him right away as the actor. The actor… “
Reb Dunzel interrupted and gave Sister Greb the background she needed to understand what they were talking about. “This actor began hanging around the park after he enrolled in an acting class with a teacher who insisted that in order to act well you had to study people close up. He would wander around talking to people and studying and imitating them. When he began studying the Man with the Ladder, the Man with the Ladder began studying him. They studied one another and imitated each other until they felt they knew one another quite well.” He waited for the Man with the Ladder to resume his story.
The Man with the Ladder started again. “‘I haven’t seen you around for a while,’ I said to him.”
“‘No, I’ve been around but you didn’t recognize me. I was working,’ he said.”
“Working?”
“‘Acting, playing a role. Do you remember the father and son who were around for a few says last month?’”
“Actually I did remember the pair. They had spent three days in the park arguing and talking. ‘Yes.’”
“‘I was the the son.’”
“I had seen them on occasion up close. ‘You were the son? I remember them. You don’t look anything like the son I remember.’”
“The actor took the statement as a compliment and replied modestly, ‘I’m an actor and a good one. Remember the man and his secretary. I was the secretary. And the man with the priest. I was the priest,’ the actor said.”
“I must have looked confused,” the Man with the Ladder confessed. “You said you were working. I had seen him a few times in plays in storefronts in the neighborhood. No matter who he played, he looked like an actor playing that character.”
“‘I was never any good in the theater,’ he confessed. ‘Being on stage made me self conscious,’ he said. ‘I became a private actor, a commission actor.’”
“What’s a commission actor?”
“‘A commission actor puts on private and personal performances not public ones. No script, improvisation, the way we live our lives.’”
“‘It sounds dangerous,’ I said to him.”
“‘Oh not that way,’ he answered. ‘If I don’t like how a role feels I turn it down. If you’re a good actor there are always lots of roles available.’”
“I’ve never heard of commission acting, I told him.”
“‘You have no cause, the actor said. You… ’”
“ ‘You could have said hello,’ I said to him, when you were in the park.”
“‘I didn’t know you in those roles,’ he explained.”
“And your between gigs now, I said.”
“‘Sort of,’ he replied. ‘I wanted to get your advice.’”
“About acting?”
“‘It’s a little hard to explain,’ he said, quietly. ‘I took this job. A woman had a lover. He left. He let his job take him to another city. It was more or less a mutual decision. She loved him, and she believed he loved her, but she never could get through to him.’ He was quiet for a moment.”
“So you were hired to play the lover.”
“‘Yes. She hired me, gave me some clothes, some pictures, let me watch a video they had made on vacation. He was not hard to imitate and it wasn’t hard to insert myself into the role. He was easy to play.’”
“What did she want? I asked him.”
“‘It’s hard to say exactly.’ He grew silent.”
“That’s always the trouble, I replied.”
“‘She was an exceptional person. She loved most of the parts of him she knew. But she couldn’t get through to him,’ he said again.”
“‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I thought I understood but I wanted to see if he did.”
“‘I mean he never understood her, he didn’t have a clue what made her tick. She’s very complex.’”
“Aren’t we all, I said to him.”
“‘Complex?’ he asked. ‘Yes we are all complex but she’s more than most. She’s a very intelligent woman. She has a very important job. It has to do with computers, information, the internet. She’s very creative. He only saw a tiny piece of her. She couldn’t even get him to acknowledge these other parts. I think he really hated them—the other parts of her,’ he blurted out suddenly. Then he turned and looked out over the park. ‘ When most people love us they love only a little part of us. We are really lucky if they just ignore the other parts. Tragedy happens when they despise those other parts, because then we have that job of making the small part of us that is loved into the whole of us. It means stretching and pulling—and most of us rip the fabric. No wonder we are unhappy. She struggled to love him as he was.’”
“Oh.”
“‘Acting an improved him was easy. I only had to adjust a few parts, shuffle a little bit of him around. He wasn’t a bad character, dense, not a bad sort. A typical man. He hadn’t a clue about the woman.’”
“I waited and then asked what was on my mind. ‘Did you, I mean…’”
“‘After a while it seemed the natural thing to do. I adapted, but… I fell in love with her, really in love, I never felt that way about anyone,’ he said sadly.”
“You mean you fell in love with the role, I said.”
“‘No, I fell in love with her,’ he said quietly.”
“And…”
“‘… out of the blue he called her. He said he missed her and wanted to try to work things out. He was coming back to town. He wanted to see her. She terminated my contract. I didn’t actually have a contract. It was day to day work.’”
“Oh, I said.”
“‘I stopped acting for a while. I just couldn’t get into…into other roles.’”
“Well? I asked. The actor pretended to be angry but I could see that he was only an actor acting angry. The memories that telling the story brought back mostly confused him.”
“‘That was a few weeks ago,’ he said after a pause. ‘Yesterday she called. She kicked him out. She wanted me back.’”
“I hesitated. She loves you.”
“‘Not me,’ he whispered, ‘the him that I was.’”
“Not you?”
“‘She never really knew me.’”
“‘Maybe,’ I said,‘ she really saw through your performance and…’”
“The actor glared at me. ‘No, I’m a really good actor.’”
“What are you going to do? I asked him.”
“‘I don’t know. I love her more than anyone. Do you have any suggestions?’”
“Love had gouged out valleys of pain on the mans face. ‘It depends of course how much you love her,’ I said, ‘really love her… ’ I held back but I think he filled in what I left unsaid.”
“He looked up at me perched on the ladder and got up. ‘Thank you,’ he said.”
“I started to complete my thought but he interrupted me.”
“‘You don’t have to say any more. I’ve made up my mind, thanks,’ he said and rushed off playing the role of a man who had seen the light at the end of the tunnel.” The man with ladder finished the story with a long, sustained and impassioned silence. “I haven’t seen him since then,” the Man with the Ladder said finally.
“What do you think happened?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“He decided,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I think he decided.”
“He loved her,” Reb Dunzel said.
“Very much,” the Man with the Ladder agreed. “More than he loved himself, I guess.” Sister Greb sighed and turned to watch the couple stumbling their way through the park.
“Do you think… ?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“It’s possible. I think he was a great actor,” the Man with the Ladder said quietly, “really a great actor.”
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel found themselves in the park one spring morning watching the usual morning crowd orbit around them. Dented circles of playing children swarmed over the sand boxes and monkey bars and swings and slides of the playground, and pulsating circles of watchful mothers filled the benches surrounding them. In larger irregular circles surrounding them, retired people occupied the benches in small bunches, heads bent close together, gossiping. Across from the Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel a young, new mother nursed her baby.
“Don’t stare,” the Man with the Ladder admonished his friend.
“I wasn’t staring,” Reb Dunzel said. “Looking, I was, staring I was not. I spent my last dollar yesterday,” he announced suddenly, his eyes fixed on the joint between nursing baby and its mother.
“On what?” the Man with the Ladder inquired.
“Nickels and dimes are hard to remember, even when they make up dollars,” he said. “I forget, I only know it by evening it had dribbled away,” he groused. “I was hoping you had some cash to buy croissants and coffee and lend me a few dollars. Sister Greb is away for a few days,” he explained, “and my clients don’t get paid until today so I don’t get paid until tomorrow.”
“And I was hoping you could lend me a few dollars,” the Man with the Ladder replied. “I paid the rent yesterday and it cleaned me out. I’m broke until tomorrow too.”
“I’m craving something,” Reb Dunzel grumbled after a few minutes of restless silence, “but I can’t tell exactly what. It feels a lot like I’m hungry but not exactly.” After a moment he continued. “I can see a piece of what I want clearly, but not all of it.” The nursing mother shifted her child to the other breast. Reb Dunzel watched the maneuver then looked away.
“A piece of what?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“A piece of my desire, the rim of what I want,” Reb Dunzel said. “Have you noticed that sometimes you have a very particular hunger that seems to be named and labeled and only one very specific thing will satisfy it, and other times you are aching for something with no name, something indefinite and obscure.”
“Exactly,” his friend said. “Sometimes only one very specific taste will satisfy your craving and other times chewing on a piece of string will satiate you. I’m hungry too,” he added. “I have about eighty four cents in my pocket, how much do you have?”
“Sixty seven cents more or less,” Reb Dunzel said without looking, “at least that’s what I had the last time I checked about fifteen minutes ago.”
“Not enough for coffee and croissants. We could buy a couple of candy bars,” the Man with the Ladder suggested. “At least they would kill the hunger.”
Reb Dunzel looked dubious. “Candy bars attack hunger and appetite indiscriminately,” he said. “I was looking forward to lunch.”
“We have enough for nachos or a bag of potato chips,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“They’re not sweet enough,” Reb Dunzel complained.
“Well, we don’t have enough for coffee and croissants, candy is out, chips are not sweet enough,” he enumerated the choices painstakingly. “I think we have exhausted the affordable treats.”
Reb Dunzel sat back on the bench and closed his eyes. The Man with the Ladder could make out the butt ends of voracious, miniature appetites racing through the twisting fissures of his friend’s brain, making sharp turns, and slamming into dead ends, scouring the terrain for something that was not only desirable but affordable—in the present circumstances.
“Crackerjacks,” Reb Dunzel boomed out. “Not too sweet but sweet enough, not candy, but candy like. Croissants they’re not, but…. And there is the surprise.”
“Crackerjacks,” the Man with the Ladder repeated, running his tongue over the name of the confection. “I haven’t had Crackerjacks in….” He was surprised how long it had been. “Do they still make them?” The idea of a surprise, a bonus under something that you could also eat stoked his appetite.” To tell the truth,” he said, “I really don’t like the sugary popcorn.”
“I really don’t care that much for the nuts part of it either,” Reb Dunzel added. “But it seems I don’t know, appropriate now. Just the right combination.”
“You’re absolutely right,” the Man with the Ladder said. “After you put aside the idea of the popcorn and block out the sticky coating and the nuts it seems exactly what we were looking for.” The irony was lost on Reb Dunzel who jingled the change in his pocket. “It’s decided then,” he said. “Now the only problem is to find them.” He stood up and looked around.
He saw a man pushing a small silver cart along a path tangent to a circle of children at the far end of the park. The image of the man was blurred but he could hear the tinkle of silver bells suspended on a string above the cart. “I don’t remember seeing that particular cart around,” he said as he pulled the Man with the Ladder up and dragged him by the elbow towards the wagon. “Maybe he sells Crackerjacks.”
“Crackerjacks,” the Man with the Ladder asked, when they got close to the snack seller.
The unfamiliar man who was pushing the three wheeled cart set the back wheels down and swung around to face them.
“How old?” he asked, lowering his eyes and surveying an arc knee high around the two men who stood in front of him.
“38,” said the Man with the Ladder.
“How old is the child for whom you are buying the Crackerjacks?” the pushcart man asked rather formally.
“38,” the Man with the Ladder repeated. “We are buying them for ourselves.”
“For children,” the man in front of the pushcart said brusquely, turning around to face them. “Crackerjacks are for children.”
“Is there a law again adults eating Crackerjacks?” the Man with the Ladder asked brusquely, “Do you have to show a certificate proving you are under 12, before you can buy…”
The man in the white uniform in front of the little wagon turned to stare at him. “The popcorn, no,” he said. “No, it’s the surprise. When adults eat Crackerjacks and get a surprise,” he paused to drive the point home, “the results are uncertain. For adults the surprise often really is a surprise.” His tone was that of someone merely stating a mundane and obvious fact of life not making a judgment. “Crackerjacks and adults are an unpredictable mix,” he added.
“Why should children have all of the fun?” The Man with the Ladder grumbled.
“I don’t remember having all that much fun as a child,” Reb Dunzel stated sadly.
“Neither do I,” the Man with the Ladder said. “But it looks that way now. I mean you look at children and all you see is a big head, a blurred hand stretched out, and a lot of laughing all of the time. I don’t see why they should be able to monopolize Crackerjacks also.” His hunger was clearly making him irritable.
The man shrugged and pointed to the section of the cart that had boxes of Crackerjacks. “Pick,” he said.
“Pick what?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Pick the box,” the man behind the cart said.
“They are Crackerjacks,” the Man with the Ladder replied. “One box is like another box.” He stared at the boxes.
“Pick,” the man insisted.
Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder surveyed the boxes. “They all look the same to me,” Reb Dunzel announced. All of them said ‘Crackerjacks’ and had a large gold seal pasted on the front that said, “SPECIAL PRIZE.” Each of them picked a box. “Remember, I warned you,” the man behind the cart said reaching out his hand for the money that completed the transaction.
They walked away excited and found a bench. “It makes me feel like a kid again,” the Man with the Ladder said, his hunger replaced by the anticipation of his prize. “What do you think our surprise will be?” the Man with the Ladder asked, suddenly remembering prizes he had gotten as a child. “I remember getting a kaleidoscope once,” he said. “It bent and fractured the world and made it look wondrous. I nearly went blind looking at things,” he remembered excitedly.
“What happened to it?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“I took it to school. I was looking at the formulas through it in a geometry class. It seemed to make them intelligible for the first time, and Mr. Peters took it away from me.”
“I remember him,” Reb Dunzel said. “He was a terror. Everything was geometry to him. He fell silent for a moment. “I got a magic ring once,” he said giddily. “Myrna Sweet promised she would kiss me for a week if I gave it to her. I did, but after she had it on her finger she ignored me.”
They both tore their boxes open greedily spilling sticky pieces of popcorn on the ground as they rummaged around looking for the prizes. “Wait,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Lets take turns looking for the prize, otherwise there won’t be popcorn left to eat. I’ll go first,” he asserted.
“Why you?” Reb Dunzel cried, “you have the ladder. I should go first.”
“No, me first,” the Man with the Ladder insisted. “You picked your box first. I should get to get the surprise first.”
“It’s not fair,” Reb Dunzel complained. “Your box looks like it’s packed more. I should get to pick out my prize first.” As he said this, adultness seemed to seize him again. He looked at the Man with the Ladder. “The Crackerjacks seem to have made us childish. Look for your prize first,” he said in an adult voice.
“No, you go ahead, you first. I’ll catch what you spill,” he said, cupping his hands under Reb Dunzel’s box.
Reb Dunzel began digging for the prize. “Wait a minute,” the Man with the Ladder said, his hand full of sticky popcorn. He piled the overflow from his friends excavation on top of his own box. “They seem to have added a lot more popcorn to the prizes than I remembered,” Reb Dunzel said.
“It’s not a good sign,” the Man with the Ladder said gravely. “As I remember it, the law of Crackerjacks is ‘the more popcorn you get, the less valuable is the prize.’”
“I still have half a box to dig through,” Reb Dunzel commented. They looked around for something on which to put the popcorn, settling for a newspaper that someone had left on a bench near them. When he had emptied the box and still not uncovered a prize, Reb Dunzel began to complain. “It’s not fair, all that anticipation, lets go back and demand our money back.”
“Turn the box over and smack it,” the Man with the Ladder instructed. “Sometimes the prize sticks to the bottom and you can’t tell it’s there.”
Reb Dunzel followed his friend’s suggestion. A small cellophane envelope popped out of the empty box of Crackerjacks.
“How did I miss it?” he asked, then “what is it?”
“It’s hard to tell exactly,” his friend said, picking it up and handing it to its owner.
Reb Dunzel ripped the opaque envelope open. “It’s a miniature whistle I think,” he said staring at the surprise. “Not a bad prize,” he volunteered, “not a bad prize at all.” He picked up the whistle and blew on it. No sound came out. “Maybe its a dog whistle,” he said. He aimed the whistle at a dog stretched out on the grass at the end of a loosely held leash, and blew. The dog scratched himself lazily.
“It’s broken,” he said disappointedly and blew again, listening carefully for a fragment of a sound. He shook it angrily. “Broken, not a sound. You try.” He handed the whistle to the Man with the Ladder.
“Broken,” the Man with the Ladder echoed after a few silent blasts. “At least the prizes we got as children worked, at least most of them did,” he said, although he vaguely remembered getting a miniature car with only three wheels. He held the whistle to his mouth, filled his lungs and blew again as hard as he could. No sound came from the whistle but he seemed to hear some echo coming from the end of the park. “Did you hear that?” he asked, “it seemed like an echo.”
“No sound, only an echo,” his friend mumbled. “I wouldn’t call a whistle that produces an echo a prize.” He walked to the nearest wire basket that held an overflow of discarded refuse and angrily flung the whistle in. He came back to the bench with a dispirited look on his face.
The disappointment brought back the hunger. Clearly disappointed, they sat and munched the popcorn from the newspaper for a while. When they finished all of the popcorn that had been produced by the search for Reb Dunzel’s prize the Man with the Ladder said, “I’m thirsty. Lets go to the fountain and get a drink before we go after the next prize.” They got up and moved slowly into the park the Man with the Ladder clutching his box of Crackerjacks tightly and holding the lid down so that the popcorn did not spill out. He turned suddenly and started walking through the trees. “Where are you going ?” Reb Dunzel asked, “the fountain is this way.” He pointed in the opposite direction. “What do you mean?” the Man with the Ladder said. “It’s this way. It’s always been this way.”
“Remember, they tore that fountain down years ago,” his friend said. “The new one is this way.”
“I can see it from here,” the Man with the Ladder insisted. “Look.” In front of him, off to the side was a water fountain. A group of children were playing, squirting water at each other.
“It can’t be,” Reb Dunzel asserted, “They tore it down years ago.”
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel moved toward the fountain carefully.
Along the path someone they recognized came walking towards them briskly. “It’s Bill,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Or Beatrice,” Reb Dunzel added.
“He’s dressed as Bill so he must be Bill today,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Hello Bill,” he said to the man who slowed and stopped in front of them, “how are you?”
“Great, really great. I’ve finally made up my mind,” he said. “I’m going to get the operation.”
“Are you sure about it?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Sure as I could be,” the man said. “Beatrice is very happy. I’ll see you around,” he declared moving away rapidly. “I have to go and prepare for the trip.”
The Man with the Ladder wanted to ask him about the jacket he
coveted but hesitated. “Well, I’m sure we’ll see you around before you head off
to
“
“
“Very strange,” Reb Dunzel said after Bill had disappeared around
a bend. “He had that operation years ago. Remember, we got a letter from
Beatrice saying it was a great success and she had gotten married and was
settling in
“I haven’t seen him for a long time,” the Man with the Ladder remembered suddenly. In front of them, an adult had joined the children and was organizing the crowd around the fountain into a triangle whose vertex lightly touched the handle that released the water. Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder moved to the base of the triangle. “Keep the angle correct,” the adult insisted.
“That man bears a striking resemblance to someone I can’t quite place,” the Man with the Ladder whispered to Reb Dunzel.
“He does,” Reb Dunzel said, trying to move so he made an absolutely straight line with the small child next to him.
“Mr. Peters,” the Man with the Ladder suddenly said, breaking into a sweat. “He looks just like Mr. Peters, the geometry teacher.
They moved forward slowly until the Man with the Ladder stood at the fountain. Next to him the man who looked like Mr. Peters instructed him. “Press the handle down so that the water flows exactly in a parabola before you drink. A parabola exactly, otherwise no drinking.” The Man with the Ladder tried to move the lever down so the water made a gentle, rounded curve but it was erratic. “Not quite there yet,” Mr. Peters insisted, “no drinking yet.” The Man with the Ladder jerked the handle and waited. The approximation to a parabola collapsed into a fractious, awkward spiral.
“Sorry, next,” Mr. Peters commanded.
“I’m thirsty,” the Man with the Ladder complained.
“Sorry, those are the rules.”
Reb Dunzel made a parabola the first turn of the handle. “Beautiful,” Mr. Peters said, “drink your fill.”
“I’m still thirsty,” the Man with the Ladder complained as they moved away from the crowd of children, “how did you do that, the parabola?” he asked Reb Dunzel.
“I haven’t a clue, but I always liked geometry,” Reb Dunzel said, letting his eyes rest on a young girl who sat alone on the ground behind the troop of children. She was looking at a ring she was wearing. When she spotted Reb Dunzel she began to throw kisses at him.
“That looks exactly like Myrna Sweet,” Reb Dunzel said, blushing as he felt the kisses land sloppily on his face. “She hasn’t changed a bit in thirty years.”
“That’s impossible,” the Man with the Ladder said scratchily. “She would be as old as you are now, not a young child,” he insisted. “She would probably look like that.” He pointed at a heavy set, middle aged woman who sat on a bench behind the child.
Reb Dunzel looked at the woman and she threw him a kiss also. He felt it land sexily on his cheek. “That might be,” he admitted, “but I would prefer if she…” he scanned the people in the park before him, “… if she looked like that.” He pointed to an scantily dressed beauty in her mid twenties standing daintily on a patch of grass close to the middle aged woman. When she caught him looking at her she wiggled and threw him a kiss too.
Reb Dunzel blushed and dropped his head.
“That was very strange,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“All of it started just after…” Reb Dunzel declared.
“Just after the whistle,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Maybe…” Both of them swung around and started walking back to the garbage can into which Reb Dunzel had discarded his disappointing prize.
“You didn’t have to throw it away immediately,” the Man with the Ladder complained.
“I thought it was broken,” Reb Dunzel said, walking a little faster, “no sound came out. It’s empty,” he exclaimed as they got to the wire basket into which he had thrown the whistle 15 minutes before. In the distance they saw the truck which collected trash in the park disappearing around a bend. “It was fun while it lasted,” he said, accepting the disappointment in an adult fashion, but staring into the empty wire basket to make sure the whistle had not escaped collection. “We still have your prize,” he said enthusiastically pointing to the box of Crackerjacks the Man with the Ladder still clutched tightly. “Lets open it now.”
Encountering Bill and Mr. Peters and Myrna Sweet had excited them and the popcorn from Reb Dunzel’s box had taken the edge off of their appetite. The Man with the Ladder let the sticky kernels scatter to the ground as he dug for the prize. “I feel it,” he said anxiously. He extracted the object he found in the box and held it up so that they could both look at it.
“What is it?” his friend asked after scrutinizing the small, metallic, cluster of miniature levers and buttons his friend held out.
“I haven’t a clue,” the Man with the Ladder said, staring at the object. “What is it for, what does it do?” he repeated after a few seconds of staring. He put it down on the bench between them and they stared at it for a while. “Maybe it has instructions on the bottom,” Reb Dunzel suggested and turned it over. It said, ‘Made in Kahzakstan.’ He set it back down on the bench.
“Maybe you have to push it,” the Man with the Ladder said and poked at different parts of it without effect.
“Don’t throw it away yet,” Reb Dunzel admonished as a disgusted look formed on the Man with the Ladder’s face. “Maybe it takes a while.”
“What takes a while?” he said. They waited fifteen minutes before Reb Dunzel picked up the device and commented, “Maybe if you shake it,” he said, shaking it violently. “It seems warm to me,” he announced.
“You are right,” the Man with the Ladder agreed poking it again. “Maybe its electronic and has to warm up.” They sat waiting another ten minutes. “This is childish and stupid,” the Man with the Ladder complained. He picked up the device and said boldly, “I’ve had enough. It’s bad enough they give you a prize without instructions, but when you can’t use your adult common sense to make it work, it’s not worth the pain.” He put it on the ground and stamped on it. The device beneath his feet seemed to make a noise and he yanked his foot away. A soft moan that was vaguely sexual suddenly came out of the device. They Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel stared at the ground as the noise increased in volume.
“It seems to have developed a voice,” Reb Dunzel commented. Both of them moved away and looked at the device from which an increasingly loud series of sounds of passionate love making came.
“It’s very loud,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“It’s going to attract attention,” his friend added as the device ratcheted up the passionate noises. As the sounds got louder, they looked up and saw people stopping all over the park and staring. “We’ve got to do something,” Reb Dunzel said. People were turning and walking towards them, scanning the ground around them for whoever was responsible for the noise. In front of them the sound from the almost invisible device was increasing in volume. Bursts of passion mixed with the moans and thrashing sounds came at a loud pitch from the device that was almost invisible on the ground. “Oh, Oh, No, Ohhhhhhh,” came from the device.
“Do something,” Reb Dunzel said loudly, the command drowned by the sound from the device.
“What should I do?” the Man with the Ladder asked helplessly.
“Stamp on it again as hard as you can,” Reb Dunzel urged.
The Man with the Ladder put his foot on it gingerly and it burst into louder squeals of delight.
“Stamp on it,” his friend insisted.
“You stamp on it,” the Man with the Ladder said. “It started to moan when I stamped on it, maybe a different foot…”
Reb Dunzel gathered his strength and plunged his foot down. The device fell silent.
A policeman appeared from behind a bush. “Is that you guys making those, those sounds,” he said looking them up and down for some corroborating evidence of what he had heard. “This is the 90’s but this is a public park.” The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel tried to look as innocent as they could but Reb Dunzel’s foot jutted out in front of him at an odd angle. “Keep the noise down or I’ll take you in for disturbing the piece,” the patrolman said. He glared at them and moved away. The people who had been moving toward them stopped suddenly and then resumed their interrupted treks.
“Keep your foot on it, for heavens sake,” the Man with the Ladder urged.
After a park like quiet had nearly returned Reb Dunzel began complaining. “My foot is falling asleep. I can’t hold it any more.” He pulled his leg back to a normal position. Immediately sounds started coming from the device. The noise of sexual thrashing was replaced by a loud wimpering which changed rapidly into sad, hurt moans and the screams of pain of someone suffering some terrible calamity.
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel backed away quickly and watched people stop moving forward, and stop and turn in their direction. People hurtled toward them rapidly. “Lets run away,” the Man with the Ladder suggested as he turned and started walking in a direction opposite to the flow of humanity in the park. Reb Dunzel followed him, passing the policeman who was rushing toward the noise.
Breathless, the Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel found a bench and waited. As a crowd gathered around it, the device went silent. The throng milled around confused, looking first in one direction then in another, straining for a sight of the calamity had caused the noise. A gaggle of policemen descended on the area and scoured the underbrush for a body. When they found nothing they dispersed the crowd and, after standing around joking and laughing, they wandered off. As they walked away the cop who had approached them earlier pointed them out to his companions.
“We’re marked forever,” the Man with the Ladder grumbled. “What kind of prize was that?” he asked resentfully. As they sat staring in the direction of the Crackerjack surprise, they saw a little girl wander past the spot where the prize lay and bend down and pick it up. Even at the distance they were from the child they could see the look of pleasure and surprise on her face, and from the distance they could hear a gentle, tinkling, music box like sound coming from her hand.
“You can’t go home again,” Reb Dunzel said sadly, stuffing a last piece of popcorn that had stuck to his jacket in his mouth, “not even to the same neighborhood.
The Man with the Ladder agreed, turning the empty box he still held upside down and scraping the last of the sticky pieces of popcorn that stuck to the very bottom of box. “I’m not sure I would want to,” he added, “if I could.”
The Man with the Ladder and his friend Reb Dunzel ate in
They were aspiring writers. Each had a daytime job. The Man with a
Ladder earned his living working on a ladder doing whatever someone would pay a
man on a ladder to do. Reb Dunzel had recently begun earning money by making up
mantras and chants for new immigrants who felt they needed an edge in the
struggle in the new world. Once a week, over a meal in
Neither of them were sure why eating in
They were picky about their choice of a restaurant. They tried to choose exactly the Chinese restaurant that matched the particular creations they were pregnant with that week so that it would thicken the air around their inventions and they could stuff them into their pockets and carry them home to nourish themselves later. In order to do this they went on expeditions to locate restaurants with atmospheres that would sustain moods they had not yet had but wanted to have, or imagined having.
When they first started eating regularly in
They spoke in whispered tones of an ultimate Chinese restaurant,
the Mother restaurant, the restaurant that embodied and incarnated the heart
and soul of all Chinese restaurants. Each of them recognized—although he could
not acknowledge it to the other because it seemed irrational and un-modern—that
the search for the Mother restaurant was a search for something else, for the
soul of
But each of them tried to conceal his conviction that something undefinable and wonderful would happen when they found the Mother of Chinese restaurants. Each dispassionately claimed to the other, that, as far as they were concerned, the only possible significance of finding the ultimate Chinese restaurant was that it would make them rich, that they would get a fortune cookie with a message about how to make a million dollars very quickly.
One night, when the choice of a place to eat was particularly difficult, they wandered around furiously trying to decide which restaurant would match their current mood. They stood for a while, on ambivalent right feet and indecisive left feet, in front of a number of restaurants waiting for a push or a pull that would carry them into a restaurant, but each time they tilted uninspired until hungry eaters pushed them into the street and they moved on.
They were standing flat footed and confused when a smell, saturated with the essence of Chinese food, knocked on the door of their noses. “Do you smell it?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“Smell it? I can taste it.” the Man with the Ladder replied, “Let’s follow the scent and eat it—I mean eat whatever smells like that.”
“Where do you suppose it’s coming from?” Reb Dunzel wondered.
“I don’t care if it’s coming from a linoleum factory, I’ll eat anything that smells that good.” They had heard rumors about a linoleum factory disguised as a Chinese sweatshop where Mexican illegals used an exotic processes to turn discarded animal parts into linoleum.
They followed it for a surprisingly long distance until it stopped at the doorway of a store front. Except for the smell which hovered around some unseen vent, there were no signs that the place was a restaurant. The smell was adamant and anchored itself to the doorway and resisted drafts that would move it an inch. They tried to see inside but the large window was lined with paper so the inside was shielded from them.
“It feels like the Grape Street Schul,” said Reb Dunzel to himself ignoring the Man with the Ladder’s perplexed look.
“Like a library,” the Man with a Ladder said in response, confusing himself.
“I don’t see any menu in the window.”
“And there are no dead roasted things hanging around. Do you think it’s a restaurant?” the Man with the Ladder asked his friend.
“It looks more like an un-restaurant,” Reb Dunzel said as he ventured through the door, “but we can always ask.” They found themselves in the vestibule of a large, empty, tiled room in which the only furniture was some heavy marble tables without table cloths and a few folding chairs. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling. No eating utensils were in sight.
An old crone dozed in a nook in one corner, her head resting on a glass case. Half hidden by her elbow, a sign read, ‘Hostess.’ As the door closed behind them, she lifted her head and squinted at them then resumed her nap. In a far corner table, ensconced in shadows which hung like decorations, two old Chinese men sat carrying on a low, sing song guttural dialogue. A jug and two glasses of wine sat on thick books in front of them.
“I believe,” the Man with the Ladder said under his breath while he moved tentatively into the room, “in a place like this one we’re sure to get a meal…”
“…the likes of which we have never eaten before.” Reb Dunzel completed the sentence as he took a step backwards.
“My thoughts exactly,” said the Man with a Ladder, “let’s get out of here.” There was a unsettled, un-Chinese disquiet in his voice.
As Reb Dunzel began his run for the door, a blur he identified as a waitress appeared and a finger waved up and down and pointed vaguely to one of the tables. As he started a turn to the exit, he followed the gesture to its source.
As he noticed that the waitress who owned the finger also had long silky tresses his motion slowed slightly. When she smiled ever so delicately, looking at him through moth eyes, over high, beautifully shaped cheekbones he stopped moving entirely. It was the face of an oriental princess, a Madam Butterfly, or Mata Hari, certainly not the face of a waitress. It was the face of one of his fantasies.
The Man with the Ladder headed for Reb Dunzel who stood motionless by the door. “Where are you going?” Reb Dunzel asked a confused Man with the Ladder, ushering him back towards a table. “ Why should we run away from a little adventure?” he asked. “How bad can the food be? Why should a smell deceive? We’ll eat and write and….” The startled Man with the Ladder shuffled with Reb Dunzel to the table to which the waitress had motioned them. The table was bare; no menus, no condiments, no tea.
The waitress moved gracefully in front of them and stood silently waiting. The Man with the Ladder noticed a short yellowing list of what looked like the day’s specials for the last decade, attached to the wall, but nothing looked appetizing.
“What would you suggest?” Reb Dunzel asked the waitress.
“Dumplings.” she said, without thinking. The Man with a Ladder
recognized the accent as
“Anything else?” the Man with the Ladder prodded.
One of the old men yelled something at the waitress. She turned and chirped like a bird at them. “That’s all I like,” she said, screwing up her face as she scanned the list of specials on the wall. “Well, beside the dumplings, maybe, pan fried shrimp. The chef bought a new pan.”
“What did they say?” Reb Dunzel asked, pointing at the two men in the corner.
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” she instructed. “Their suggestions are…,” she hesitated, “impractical.” She turned and renewed her chirping complaint. Reb Dunzel stared at her, suddenly remembering another restaurant where the waitresses wore dresses slit up to their hips. The waitress looked at him as if she was reading his mind and his fantasy evaporated instantly. “That sounds fine by me,” he said enthusiastically, though he had only listened to her voice and not heard what she had actually recommended and hoped it didn’t involve frogs or parts of eels.
“Anything else?” the waitress asked.
Reb Dunzel desperately wanted to impress her. He wanted her to think of him not as an ordinary walk-in-off-the-street-tourist, not as the run of the mill dumb big nose, not even as a powerful foreigner—even though her English was better than his—but as something else although he was not sure of what.
“I would like Chicken Confucius style,” he said in his most
authoritative, commanding voice. Someone had told him it was the most elegant
dish in
“OK,” she said, not particularly impressed, “just remember I warned you.”
When the dinner came the dumplings were spectacular. They tasted
of
“It tastes like someone cooked a drawing of a chicken,” the Man with the Ladder decided. “Crayolas and construction paper, I think,” he said, not able to get the taste out of his mouth.
“Charcoal on parchment,” Reb Dunzel suggested.
“Sumi and Cinnabar on rice paper,” the waitress chimed in.
The idea of cooking a picture of a chicken tickled their imagination. A blurred outline of a story appeared and hovered over the remains of the Confucious chicken in the plate in front of them. The notion was much more appealing then the actual dish and they began weaving a story about it. As usual, they wrote on napkins. One idea sprung from another until they had filled up all of the napkins on their table with rambling scrawl and had to ask the waitress for more.
“We are low on napkins,” she replied. “Writers should write in a book.” She carefully extracted a brown, paper covered Chinese notebook from the cabinet on which the old lady was resting our head. “Only the first page is used,” she commented. “It’s a gift,” she added, “since you are our only customers tonight.”
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel took turns scribbling notes. Behind them, the voices of the two elderly Chinese men filled the air like tobacco smoke. Although they could not understand a word, it seemed clear from the density and texture of the exchanges, that the old Chinese men, reading and drinking tea, were having a literary argument.
“What are they arguing about?” Reb Dunzel asked the waitress when she came to fill their water glasses.
She dismissed the elderly debaters. “Old men
talking nonsense. They are poets,” she said, half in respect, half
contemptuously. “They pretend to be writers of fortunes
because they think that will make them respectable in
She turned and went to the kitchen but returned quickly with the treat that marked the end of the meal. On a small plate were a heap of Lichee nuts and two fortune cookies. They tasted distinctly of old tea leaves and were as stale as the fortunes inside. “You like Chinese food,” Reb Dunzel’s told him with amazing accuracy. The Man with the Ladder’s fortune was even blander, “You will have an interesting day, but not to excess.”
“Unforgivable, horrible,” the waitress remarked as she read over their shoulders. “Dull, dull, dull,” she barked at the two old men. The older of the pair of old Chinese men yelled toward the table at which Man with a Ladder and Reb Dunzel sat. “His fortune,” he said pointing shakily at his companion. The second old man drew himself up. He was a little tipsy. “Absolutely falsified. Not mine, his.” He pointed at his companion.
“Neither of you telling the truth,” the waitress interjected. “You write them together. Poets,” she snorted.
“A bad translation,” the two old Chinese men squealed together and turned to the jug on their table.
Reb Dunzel insisted on paying for the meal so he could leave an impressive tip. The waitress giggled at him as she picked the bills and coins from his hand, counting slowly.
“Come again,” she said to him and then added something in Chinese.
“What does that mean?” he inquired.
“It means…” she broke into giggles and ran off.
The two friends made their way out of the twisted entranceway and walked home in silence, each thinking about a different part of the meal but both of them about the Mata Hari waitress.
II
Although both the Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel thought about the un-restaurant and the giggling waitress many times in the week that followed the meal, the next time they met in Chinatown and had to decide where to eat, the odd un-restaurant did not come to mind immediately, but, like some impossible paradox, kept itself hidden, around some curve in their heads, obscured by shadows.
“Where shall we eat?” the Man with a Ladder asked innocently when
they met on the spot from which they usually invaded
“I was thinking someplace quiet but intense,” Reb Dunzel said.
“I was leaning to toward something traditional but progressive,” his companion replied. They consulted their inventory of restaurants searching for the place that was quiet but intense traditional but progressive. They searched their data base of establishments. “Well there’s Sam Wu’s,” the Man with the Ladder noted.
“Or Mon Bo’s,” Reb Dunzel suggested, “and that exhausts intense but quiet and traditional but progressive.”
The haunting aroma assaulted their noses and the memory of their experience at the small restaurant with the giggling waitress and flooded back and surprised them.
“I wouldn’t call it quiet and intense,” said Reb Dunzel.
“Certainly not traditional and progressive,” the Man with a Ladder added.
“I don’t know if we should bother, the food wasn’t that good.” Reb Dunzel said, playing the devil’s advocate. While their head prepared for a debate, their feet had already turned them into the smell which carried them in the direction of the little un-restaurant with no name. “The pan fried shrimp were OK, but the Chicken Confucius was awful.”
“But the dumplings were superb,” the Man with the Ladder proclaimed.
“I don’t know if good dumplings are a sufficient reason for choosing a place to eat. Remember the time you chose that restaurant because the waitresses wore nearly transparent silk dresses,” Reb Dunzel reminded him. The waitress with the Mata Hari face slammed into his memory and he started walking faster.
“You were the one who picked out the meal,” the Man with the Ladder replied accusatorially.
“The menu was in Chinese,” Reb Dunzel said defensively.
“Well even with pot luck you think you could have done better then ordering three different varieties of algae.”
“Is that what it was?”Reb Dunzel sighed. “I was afraid to ask, those waitresses looked a little fierce up close.”
Their heads continued to evaluate restaurants on their mental list
while their feet carried them through the twisted vestibule of the
un-restaurant with no name. The old crone dozed behind her display cases; the
two old Chinese men in flowing robes were arguing forcefully in the corner
booth. It was as if it was only a few minutes, not a week, had passed since
they had been there. The moth eyed, waitress greeted them with a rough
familiarity. “The writers,” she said warmly as they settled into their chairs.
She pointed to the specials on the wall and leaned close to whisper, “No matter
what I say when the hostess passes by, don’t order anything made from an animal
with four feet tonight.” She used her head to point toward the crumpled, dozing
old woman who roused herself and ambled crookedly towards them. They were still
pondering this mysterious communication when she announced, “The pork is very
fresh today.” The old crone labored past them. “Empress of
“How many feet does a sesame chicken have?” the Man with the Ladder asked Reb Dunzel.
“One more than the Confucius chicken which is good today” the waitress said. “Practice make perfect.”
Two of the three dishes they ordered were exceptional. “How can chicken Confucius style taste like cardboard one day and ambrosia the next?” Reb Dunzel wondered aloud.
“It’s like sex.” he heard a deep voice say from behind him. He turned but all he saw was the waitress with her hands covering her mouth giggling her way to the kitchen.
After they finished their meal and the table was cleared, she returned with their fortune cookies which tasted like styrofoam packing material. When the fortune cookies came the two poets who had argued constantly in the corner fell silent and stared at them. They cracked them open. Reb Dunzel read his fortune. “When the string of a lute breaks there is always a way to tie it back together again.”
The Man with a Ladder listened then read his. “When your heart is torn there is no way to mend it.”
The two Chinese men leaned over. “Do you like them?”
“They’re…exceptional.” Reb Dunzel said, hiding his confusion. “Are they supposed to be logically clear or is guessing permitted.”
“Oky doky, does not matter particularly,” the frailer of the poets answered. “In Chinese they sound even better.” He said something quickly in a softly flowing mandarin. Both of the old men were a little tipsy again. “We were wondering perhaps you could settle an argument for us,” the more sober of the two asked in unaccented English, “if you happen to know. I say before there was a restaurant here there was a book store but my companion here, says that before there was a restaurant here there was a store that sold maps.”
“Plumbing supply store,” the waitress yelled.
“Church,” the old crone muttered lifting her head for a fraction of a second.
“Brothel,” came from out of the kitchen.
“I have no idea,” the Man with a Ladder answered quickly.
“I’m not sure either,” Reb Dunzel added.
The scholarly looking Chinese man shrugged; “it does not matter I expect,” he said quickly.
The idea of an establishment that carried the spirit of the businesses that preceded it sparked the impulse to write, but when they asked for more napkins the waitress was adamant. “That’s what you have a notebook for,” she reminded them sharply. “Bring it along with your appetites and imagination when you come to eat.” They were reduced to scribbling the ideas they had on cuffs and collars until one of the old men in the corner surreptitiously handed them a piece of a scroll. “Its fortune cookie paper but no matter,” he said. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
After the second meal in the un-restaurant, making a decision
about which restaurant to eat at became part of the ritual of eating in
“Maybe there’s a crowd at lunchtime,” Reb Dunzel guessed. Their curiousity got the better of them. “When is it really busy?” they asked the waitress.
“Monday, the Majong crowd, Tuesday, the Tongs come in, Wednesday, the Bonsai club and bowling league, Thursday, we gear up for you, of course, Fridays and the weekends, tourists.”
“I see,” the Man with a Ladder said,
“Which nights are the tips best?” Reb Dunzel asked.
The waitress looked at him. “Thursday, tonight.” she laughed. “Thursdays the tips are best,” and she whispered something in Chinese. “Are you lonely,” she asked. “We aim to please?” Would you like to eat in company. We can hang the light out.” The next Thursday the place was full. Waiters in white jackets and waitresses in smart oriental uniforms danced through the isles of tables.
“Tourists. We lit the light,” the Mata Hari waitress said, when she finally came to take their order. They pleaded with her for the quiet again and the next week they were the only customers. In the weeks that followed, each time they ate at the un-restaurant, the food seemed to get better and better though there was always some disastrous dish masquerading as a delicious one they had had, usually only the week before.
“It’s like a symphony with a madman playing second fiddle, then the piccolo, then the tuba,” is how Reb described it, “You never know where the discordant element will pop out at you next.”
In spite of this unpredictability—or perhaps because of it—their creative juices always seemed to flow. The anticipation of the meal spawned ideas and images, and afterwards, the struggle to find words, both good and bad, to describe the panoply of taste sensations stirred up stories. Their imagination soared and their stories became, at least it seemed so to them, deeper and more profound.
“Something’s dreadfully wrong,” the Man with the Ladder solemnly announced one week as the last of the Beef Chow Fun disappeared into Reb Dunzel’s mouth.
“You mean the old crone?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“No, what’s wrong with the old crone?” the Man with a Ladder asked, looking up.
“I may have imagined it, but I thought I saw her smile at me.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“The waitress?” Reb asked breathless. She was wearing a sweatshirt over a traditional silk dress that was slit up to her hips. Reb Dunzel tried not to think about it too much or the size of the tip he was going to leave.
“No, I’m talking about the food,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“What do you mean, everything was delicious.”
“Precisely, not a single dish was disappointing. Where’s the other shoe going to drop?”
“What other shoe?” Reb Dunzel asked innocently as if, if he pretended to be ignorant of what the Man with a Ladder was talking about, he would not have to think about it.
“Maybe on the fortune cookies,” the Man with a Ladder muttered to himself.
“They’re always bad, how could they get worse? I’m not even going to touch mine,” Reb Dunzel announced, “maybe it will explode or something.”
When the fortune cookies arrived they glistened as if they were plated with gold. The waitress waited as they cracked them open. The Man with the Ladder was still suspicious even when his cracked open delicately like a porcelain shell, disgorging its fortune easily gently. “Learn your lessons while they’re easy.”
Reb Dunzel’s cookie opened to his touch like a flower. The fortune lay there exposed. “Mourn in your victory, the death of possibility.”
The old men were napping, heads resting on the table. The activity at the table across from theirs stirred them. “Do you like them?” they asked in unison.
“They’re a mouthful!” the Man with the Ladder exclaimed, popping the cookie in his mouth. Even the waitress nodded her approval. The meal was perfect and the evening was complete.
“It feels wonderful,” the Man with the Ladder announced.
Reb Dunzel muttered to himself “it’s become the ultimate Chinese restaurant.”
The Man with the Ladder agreed. “It has. It didn’t start out that way. It never looked like the ultimate Chinese restaurant. It was an un-restaurant. The food…”
“was incomplete…”
“erratic…”
“at first but…”
“Now…”
“it’s become the ultimate Chinese restaurant.”
“It feels wonderful, like…”
“… a time bomb ticking, a fuse fizzling, a rope swinging in the breeze, a…”
“Stop,” the Man with the Ladder insisted, although Reb Dunzel had expressed his feelings exactly. Reb Dunzel continued complaining. “How can we eat anywhere else now. We are bound here. After this meal choice has become an illusion. There is nothing to look forward to, at most repetition. “Mourn in your victory the death of possibility,” he recited. “And…”
“And what?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Nothing happened,” came the reply. “I am just as ignorant about why we eat Chinese food as I always was.”
“No revelations.”
“No fortune making fortune cookie. No million dollars.”
“But…”
“the food was wonderful…”
“and…”
“…who know s what next week is going to be like?” Reb Dunzel said hopefully.
For each of them the week was a crowning joy; they were as creative as they could be. They finished stories that had resisted them for months. Reb Dunzel’s chants seemed particularly effective and customers came back raving about how successful and lucky they had been that week and ordered a second chant. The Man with the Ladder whose week it was to receive the rejection notice received instead a letter saying one of their stories was being considered for publication in an anthology of interesting pieces of new odd fiction. It was a spectacular week.
III
The Thursday after the tiny un-restaurant became the ultimate
Chinese restaurant began routinely. Each waited quietly for the other to bring
up the question about where they should eat and while they waited in silence
the smell came and conscripted them. But it took them on an unusual path to the
ultimate Chinese restaurant. It zig zagged through all
of
It looked like a toy fire engine out of a children’s story book. The firemen hopped off energetically and unraveled a brightly colored hose. They connected it to a hydrant which stood near by. “Turn on the water” the Man with the Ladder heard one of them cry, and the fireman holding the hose on the hydrant twirled his wrench. The water surged briefly, twisting the hose in a curliqued arc, then stopped, and, like actors in a silent comedy, the firemen scrambled and dashed around until they found another hydrant and repeated the operation with the same effect. One of the firemen set energetically out to find another hydrant.
The fire was maliciously intent on destruction. They watched through the broken front window as it waltzed a turn in the dining room where it bounced off of the tables and chairs as if it were playing; it curled itself into the little cubby hole in which the hostess huddled and scorched it. It moved to the table at which the two Chinese old men always sat and charred it to ash. It leapt to their table and burnt it to a cinder. As they watched it tunneled into the invisible heart of the restaurant, the kitchen, flaring and blazing like fireworks. Then it snaked back out the vestibule and escaped into the street where it did a little victory dance and then extinguished itself.
“The other shoe has finally dropped,” the Man with the Ladder grieved.
“I’ve lost my appetite, perhaps permanently,” Reb complained as he turned away.
They shuffled around restlessly surveying the disaster. A man in a cooks outfit stumbled out of the restaurant carrying a pan. Around a corner two men who looked very much like the fortune cookie writers disappeared in animated conversation into the shadows.
“I didn’t see the waitress…” said the Man with the Ladder in a worried and anxious tone.
“… or the old crone,” Reb Dunzel added.
“Do you think they were hurt? What will they do now?”
“Them, what about us,” Reb Dunzel moaned.
The fireman who had disappeared in search of a working hydrant reappeared. He handed them a note. “An old lady said to give it to you.”
“Don’t worry,” the note said, “spirit endures,” signed, the Empress of Mott street and, on the bottom penciled in so that the words giggled; “Avoid any food with three legs today.”
They watched as the fire company completed its work packing the brightly colored hose back on the truck. A man came out of one of the nearby stores with a mop and mopped the sidewalk in front of the burned out store. Someone else came out with a large sign done in Chinese characters which he put up over the broken window; In English under the characters were the words, ‘GONE TO VISIT THE QUEENS.’
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel stood aimlessly on the deserted street, as water sloshed around their feet. The faint remnant of the smell that had carried them there was so thoroughly mixed with the acrid stink of fire and burnt memories that it stung their noses. The moved away sorrowfully, and wandered around purposelessly until their appetites woke up. “Any place,” Reb Dunzel muttered, but they could not contemplate eating Chinese food so they found a table at the local McDonalds and finished off hamburgers and a soft drink in silence.
“Not even a last meal,” the Man with the Ladder lamented. “Not even a final fortune,” Reb Dunzel eulogized, “a condemned man gets better. They walked home without uttering a word.
IV
It was a month before they could gather the resolution and
appetite to think about eating together in
“I think we should try to find a new, a new, favorite restaurant,” Reb Dunzel suggested, refraining from using the word ultimate.
“Like getting back on the horse after it throws you,” the Man with the Ladder explained.
“… or getting back into the water after you nearly drown,” said Reb Dunzel.
“We should at least try to discover which of the restaurants in
“… has a wandering smell… “
“… that doesn’t look like a restaurant…”
They took turns finding an excuse to linger on the street waiting hopefully for the smell to come to them. Reb Dunzel found stones in his shoes which required sitting and searching his shoes and socks thoroughly. The Man with the Ladder complained that some piece of city dirt had gotten in his throat and spent a long time with a handkerchief sneezing and coughing. Finally, after the exhausted every reasonable misfortune they could think of, they conceded that the smell was not coming. They searched their memories and visited the restaurant that was their anchor before they encountered the un-restaurant, the place they could always depend on for a more than decent meal and a modicum of inspiration and, although the dishes were good, they seemed nothing more than the semblance of food and raised mocking ghosts of meals at the burnt out, ultimate restaurant. Their inspiration and creativity hid from them resentfully.
“We have to start looking for it again,” was the most the Man with the Ladder could get out.
“It’s hopeless,” Reb Dunzel replied. “We found it and it was taken away. Why bother?” but he nodded his head in agreement. “I guess we have to try.”
The next Thursday in
“Lets go back and look at… at…where it was,” Reb Dunzel suggested, “perhaps we can get a clue about…” With a shrug, the Man with the Ladder agreed and they set off. When they turned into the street where the un-restaurant had lurked, they saw that something new had replaced the burnt out remnants of the mother of Chinese restaurants. The construction was makeshift. “They seemed they’ve put just enough over the old structure to make it usable,” the Man with the Ladder said, “There’s a lot of lumber.”
“It looks like a lumberyard,” Reb Dunzel observed.
From the inside they could hear the sound of a saw slicing lumber. “It is a lumberyard,” the Man with the Ladder said. He pointed to a sign dangling above the door that said LUMBERYARD in English under some Chinese characters.
“Maybe one of the workers knows if they have re-opened the restaurant somewhere else” Reb Dunzel hoped. A man in a hard hat stood moving 2x4’s from one pile to another. “Excuse me,” Reb Dunzel said, trying to get the man’s attention, “Excuse me sir. We’re looking for the restaurant that used to be here.”
The man gestured casually toward a charred wall where the remnants of the days specials could still be made out. “What do you want?” he barked at them.
“We’d like to know if the restaurant relocated,” Reb Dunzel asked.
“You have trouble with English? I said, there’s the menu what do you want?” Reb Dunzel stood stock still, confused.
“I’ll have the Moo Shu Pork.” the Man with the Ladder blurted out.
The hard hat turned and yelled some long convoluted message in Chinese to someone in the back of the yard. The saw stopped buzzing.
“And you?” he asked Reb Dunzel who was still a little confused.
“I was looking forward to chicken Confucius style,” he admitted.
“Sorry, all out of chicken pictures,” the worker said solemnly. A familiar giggle rang out from the wood shed.
“How about Roast Duck and dumplings?” Reb Dunzel replied.
The hard hat gave another yell to the back and gestured them to a semblance of a table made of a piece of plywood resting on two wooden horses. They had only just sat down when a female worker, hair tucked under a cap advertising the lumberyard, walked out dressed in coveralls, carrying a tray with their meal. They scrutinized her carefully and although there seemed to be a family resemblance it was not the moth-eyed waitress from the ultimate, un-restaurant. But her coveralls danced on her body and Reb Dunzel’s imagination squirmed.
The meal was erratically good. The Moo Shu Pork and the Roast Duck were spectacular but the dumpling were unbelievably awful. Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder quickly found ideas bobbing and weaving around the dinner. Reb Dunzel Dunzel took out the notebook they had taken to carrying around and they scribbled profusely. After the meal they waited.
“Anything else?” the waitress said as she wiped the plywood panel they were eating on. “Oh,” she reminded herself, “You want fortunes.” She called to the person working the saw. The man ripped off the top page of an order-book and scribbled on it in pencil. He tore the page in half, crumpled both pieces and tossed them over to the waitress. She carefully flattened out the papers and turned to the Man with the Ladder and read: “You can’t cut down tree without going against the grain.” To Reb Dunzel she recited, “You like chicken pictures, but not to excess.” Then she handed them the bill which was for fourteen board feet of 2 x 4’s and disappeared. Reb Dunzel Dunzel left the tip under a scrap of veneer.
“Why does this place look like a lumber yard?” the Man with the Ladder asked the worker who stopped slicing panels of plywood just long enough to take their money.
“It is a lumberyard.”
“How come a lumber yard serves food?” the Man with a Ladder asked.
The worker shrugged. “We don’t really serve food, only occasionally someone wanders in and if there’s stuff left over from lunch it seems a shame to let it go to waste. Big noses always are asking questions,” he muttered and a giggle seemed to ride towards them over the noise of the saw.
The next time they went to eat in
“We can always ask,” Reb Dunzel said with an unhappy look on his face.
When they walked through the door they were greeted by a squat, pudgy Chinese man in a business suit whose face reminded them of the hostess at the un-restaurant. “Yes, how can I help you?” he asked, looking up from his computer. On the wall an electronic sign ran quotes from Asian markets. The construction was partial at best; a list of wood and cost per running foot were still on one of the walls and the menu of weekly specials from the original restaurant still had not been painted over.
“Excuse the interruption,” Reb Dunzel stuttered, “last week this used to be a lumber yard. How…”
The stockbroker did not let him finish the sentence. “How did it
become a stock brokers office so quickly?“Things
change, fast, especially Chinese things,” he said. “Keep up with the times. Change, change, change. International
commerce. Lumber is out; stocks are in. Buying and selling is
everything. What is it exactly that you want?” he asked. The office was filled
with the noise of a hidden tickertape and the screen
in front of them announced that CMCV futures had opened in
“Well,” Reb Dunzel hesitated, “we’re really looking for a place to eat. We thought you might know where…”
“What do you want?” the stock broker asked insistently.
“We thought you might know where the lumberyard which was here…”
“Are you hard of hearing or something?” the pudgy man asked quite loudly.
“I’ll have pan friend shrimp,” the Man with the Ladder said abruptly.
“And you?” he asked Reb Dunzel.
“Dumplings and Confucious chicken,” Reb Dunzel said without thinking.
The stock broker swung around to his computer and typed furiously. The noise of the tickertape stopped. He gestured to a desk which had been cleared off and two swivel chairs. “It’s non-smoking,” he apologized and got up and disappeared into a room in the back of the office, reappearing almost instantaneously with their dishes.
“This would make a good story,” Reb Dunzel decided over his dumplings, “but for the life of me I can’t figure out what the plot is.”
“It’s in Chinese,” the Man with the Ladder whispered.
“Well then don’t ask me to figure it out,” Reb Dunzel cautioned, “or it will end up having something to do with algae.” A familiar giggle rang out from the back room.
“Anything else?” the stock broker asked them when they were through with their meal.
“Fortune cookies would be nice,” the Man with the Ladder suggested.
The stock broker reached into a rolledex and produced two fortune
cookies. They opened at the touch. “Change is collective pretend,” said the Man
with the Ladder’s. “Easier to parallel park Himalayan mountains
then take spirit of
“How did you like the food?” he asked.
“Well,” the Man with the Ladder said gingerly, “the pan fried shrimp was excellent but dumplings were…” he searched for a word. ‘Horrible’, ‘disastrous’, ‘inhumane’, all presented themselves but he left them unsaid.
“Well, what do you expect, this is a stock broker’s office,” the stock broker reminded them.
“I’ve had better Chinese food in lumber yards,” the Man with the Ladder whispered a little too loudly to Reb Dunzel. The stock broker looked offended and was only slightly mollified by the generous tip.
They walked out of the stock brokers office with puzzled looks on their faces. “I don’t understand,” the Man with the Ladder said, looking for guidance from Reb Dunzel who had a look on his face that reflected the Man with the Ladder‘ own.
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Reb Dunzel agreed.
“I think we should think about it,” the Man with the Ladder suggested.
“About what exactly?” Reb Dunzel wanted to know.
“I’m not exactly sure,” was the Man with the Ladder’s reply. “But
maybe we should take a break from eating in
For the next few weeks they ate at the local Burger King. “It’s
neutral,” Reb Dunzel commented, defending their choice. “Nourishment,
no provocative inspiration, only hamburger smells.” They struggled too
make sense of their
“I think we are ready for Chinese food again,” the Man with the
Ladder announced one Thursday. “We can’t put off eating in
Reb Dunzel concurred with reservations. “I’m not sure we
confronted anything.” The memories of the ultimate restaurant, the fire, the
lumberyard and the stockbrokers office were fading.
“It might have been a run of bad Moo Shu Pork that had an aftereffect. We
should go back.” Their creative energies had weakened from the string of
foreign restaurants they had eaten at, and both of them were looking to
“I think we should decide on the restaurant before we set out,” Reb Dunzel suggested. “How about Sam Wu’s?” It was a safe, familiar choice. “Wonderful,” the Man with the Ladder said, agreeably.
They made their way to Sam Wu’s only to be confronted with a sign that announced that the restaurant was closed for renovations. “What kind of renovations?” the Man with the Ladder demanded to know standing in front of the entrance and speaking so loudly to the shuttered doorway that the tourists passing by looked at him. “It was completely renovated when it opened twenty years ago,” he complained, “I liked it the way it was.”
“Why don’t we just look?” Reb Dunzel suggested. “It can’t hurt
just to look, maybe…” He turned to the Man with the Ladder who conceded that
looking couldn’t hurt probably, although he had a feeling that they may have
been premature in their decision to resume their
“Its completely redone.”
“Really finished.”
“No pieces of a lumberyard…”
“…hinting at a restaurant.”
“…decorating a stock broker’s office…”
“It’s a…”
“restaurant,” they said together in disbelief.
“But where’s the smell?” Reb Dunzel asked suspiciously, “there’s no smell.” They stood quietly waiting for the smell to make an appearance, sniffing the air, searching for it. “It’s completely remodeled…” Reb Dunzel said, trying not to pay attention to the significance of the absence of the smell.
“There’s a dead duck in the window,” the Man with the Ladder pointed out.
“And a menu,” Reb Dunzel added, “and…” The front of the building was all glass but when they peered in all they could see were potted trees and red banners announcing a grand opening. It was a beautiful shiny new restaurant. No trace of the decades’ specials appeared on the wall.
“Do you think they serve food?” the Man with the Ladder asked Reb Dunzel as they pushed through the front door.
“Of course we serve food—we are a restaurant if you haven’t noticed.” a startled maitre de said testily. The menus on the table were a bad omen and the meal they ordered arrived carried securely by a middle aged Chinese waiter dressed in a black suit, certainly no food for Reb Dunzel’s fantasies. The food was even less exciting. The dishes were uniformly mediocre, without promise or potential; the Confucius chicken tasted like Confucius chicken, the roast duck like roast duck. They were recognizable and indifferent.
“Even the stock broker’s office served better Chinese food,” Reb Dunzel reflected loudly without any attempt to cloth his disappointment in a diplomatic garb, “and he might have been Korean.” When the fortune cookies came they were sharply to the point. Reb Dunzels said; “When Cyclodyen reaches 110 buy. Sell when it hits 234. The Man with the Ladder‘s fortune stated bluntly, “Sell Romulex short.” They rolled up the fortunes, left them in the remnants of the Moo Shu Pork without a second thought, and walked home in silence.
V
When Thursday came they were caught in a dilemma. Their creativity
and imagination demanded
“What’s left for us,” the Man with the Ladder asked directly.
“Nothing but starting from scratch,” Reb Dunzel submitted, but the tone made it clear that he shared the Man with the Ladder’s reservations. They were running through their list of abandoned restaurants when each of them smelled the smell. Each refused to acknowledge it, insisting the other make the first move. Finally Reb Dunzel couldn’t take it any more. “Do you think?” Reb Dunzel whispered, without finishing his question.
“I haven’t go the least idea,” the Man with a Ladder replied, whispering also. “Don’ t pay attention,” he said as they turned simultaneously into the smell. “Don’t look as if your paying attention,”
“I don’t care,” Reb Dunzel said nonchalantly.
The smell took them up and down alleys, through twisted back streets that they did not remember existing. After a while Reb Dunzel said in a hardly audible voice. “It’s taking us in a different direction entirely, the opposite direction.” As both of them slowed down, preparing to bolt at the first sign of something weird, the smell took one final sharp turn, deposited them on an unfamiliar street corner and disappeared.
They looked around.
“No lumber yard here.”
“No stock brokers office.”
“Not even a restaurant. Only…”
There was no one and nothing in sight except two pretzel sellers standing in front of their wagons which were parked right next to one another.
Reb Dunzel took the initiative. “You wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a lumber yard around?” he asked the nearest preztel seller.
“Or a stock brokers office,” the Man with the Ladder chimed in.
The Chinese pretzel sellers looked at one another and shrugged.
“I didn’t think so,” the Man with the Ladder said. “We been set up by a smell.”
“Smells are wicked things,” one of the pretzel sellers commented. “A taste is even wickeder.”
The Man with a Ladder stared at the pretzel sellers. “I’m curious. Why are the two of you bunched up on the same corner. Why don’t you sell from opposite corners or different blocks.”
“It’s a merchandising strategy,” the other announced. “Give the customer a choice. Freedom to choose.”
“But you have the same pretzels and soda,” the Man with a Ladder insisted.
“Freedom is another word for nothing left to loose,” the first pretzel seller asserted.
“Or gain sometimes” the second chimed in.
“Besides,” the closer of the two pretzel sellers remarked, “selling is merely a way of making a living. It is boring. Together we keep one another alive. What I can’t reach from the front, he reaches from the back. He can watch the store when I want to shop…”
“…or go to the bathroom. He’s
Chinese, so around him there’s a bit of
“I’ll settle for a pretzel,” the Man with a Ladder said very tentatively, not sure he wanted to kill his appetite with a pretzel.
“All out of pretzels,” the pretzel seller declared. There was a big pile of pretzels on his wagon. “These are for show, hard, stale,” though it seemed to the Man with the Ladder that steam was rising from them. “Anything else you like?” he asked.
“I like pan-friend shrimp,” the Man with the Ladder said boldly.
“Why didn’t you say so. I don’t happen to have any but my friend here”—he pointed with a flourish to the other pretzel seller beside him—”I know for a fact that he has…”
“Here you are,” the other pretzel seller said. “From lunch you understand, but untouched,” he assured him and opened a door in his cart and whipped out a little seat from under his cart and pulled down a flip down panel which jutted out and made a little table. The other pretzel seller made a similar seat for Reb Dunzel.
“And you,” his companion asked, turning to Reb Dunzel.
“Confucius chicken,” Reb Dunzel responded hesitantly.
“I’m sorry,” the seller said. “I’m out of chicken pictures, “but…but…” He turned to the second pretzel seller who was polishing the chrome on his wagon and chirped a little in Mandarin then in English. “Remember you got a take out order of Confucious Chicken for lunch and never ate it. Check your inventory.”
“Yes,” The other pretzel seller turned very serious. “Let me check the inventory.” He plunged his head into the guts of the wagon.
“One cooked drawing of a chicken,” he said jokingly, whipping out a tray on which a delicate plate of Confucious Chicken lay wrapped in cellophane. “It comes with an order of fried dumplings,” he added, putting the plate of dumplings next to the glistening chicken.
From somewhere behind the pretzel sellers and their customers a giggle arose. The Pretzel tellers polished their wagons making believe they heard nothing. “I bet you fellas were looking for that restaurant that used to be around here. You’re looking for that Chinese restaurant, aren’t you?”
“That restaurant,” Reb Dunzel repeated, confused.
“That restaurant, you know, the restaurant with real Chinese food, that restaurant.”
“The one my mother was the hostess at.”
“And my sister worked at.”
“You’d remember my sister,” the taller of the pretzel sellers said, “she was beautiful. My mother slept a lot,” he added, putting his head down on the cart in a perfect imitation of the old crone. And our fathers, they wrote fortunes for cookies.”
“They wrote fortunes like this,” his partner chimed in, bending over and mussing his hair and throwing a towel over his shoulder in a perfect imitation of one of the old Chinese poets in the restaurant. He looked at Reb Dunzel. “Armies never never surrender at night.”
The other pretzel seller caught the spirit. “The warning shoot warns the shooter.” They burst into laughter. “That was fortune cookie writing all right.”
Then both of the pretzel sellers grew very serious. “That restaurant burnt down,” one said.
“Yes, down to the ground,” his companion added.
“If you’re looking for that restaurant,” the other said, “it went up in smoke. Cheech and Chong.
“Up in smoke is right.”
“Became pure spirit.”
“Pure smog.” They laughed and laughed.
“Had to be.”
“It’s the fate of ultimate restaurants.”
The two pretzel sellers turned to face Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder. “There is no ultimate Chinese restaurant, no spirit caught, embalmed and mummified. The spirit of people is in the people, in the nitty gritty of living—and in their food, of course.
“And in their poetry,” the other pretzel seller added, “and their fortunes.”
“Certainly their poetry, but it loses something in the translation.”
“Forget about ultimate restaurants,” one of the pretzel sellers reminded them.
“Once you’ve seized the spirit—or it’s seized you,” the other interposed, “you have it.”
“Or it has you,” the other added.
“It may not be over until the fat lady plays the Erhu as we Chinese say, but when its over its over.”
“The trick is,” the pretzel seller standing closest to Reb Dunzel explained, “the trick is to bring that spirit to the table at every restaurant you eat at. No point in searching for the ultimate Chinese restaurant. The spirit endures, it persists, it continues in the face or argument that it shouldn’t or can’t.”
“You may not like all of it. Some of it is not likeable,” the other pretzel seller acknowledged.
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel finished off the meal while the pretzel sellers leaned against their wagons and chattered. “I expect you want a fortune cookie,” one of them said suddenly. “I don’t have a fortune cookie,” he said, “but…”
“I happen to have a couple of fortune pretzels,” said the other.
“That’s going too far,” the Man with a Ladder said.
“I guess so,” one of the pretzel sellers said, “but this is
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel read their fortunes in turn.
“Beauty is always bait for one trap or another,” said Reb Dunzel’s. The Man with the Ladder’s read, “The improbable is merely the impossible with a license.”
“Well,” said the pretzel sellers “we are closing up now. Have a good trip, search well and prosper.”
“And come visit us now and then.”
“Don’t be strangers.”
“You know where we are,” they said.
“How much is the meal,” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Oh this one is on the house.”
“Free.”
“No charge at all.”
A giggle seemed to grow louder from behind the pretzel sellers. “It’s been fun,” they yelled as they swung the carts around and disappeared down the street and swung around a corner.
“No more ultimate restaurants,” Reb Dunzel said sadly after a moment.
“But something better I think,” the Man with the Ladder was quick to respond, “Something much better.”
In the weeks that followed they ate in
The Man with the Ladder was babysitting for Tatanya Schwartz the way he usually babysat the little girl while her mother was working. He sat at the very top of the Ladder and she sat on one of the benches in the park.
“Tell me another story about God,” the little girl said, very seriously.
“My stories about God are a little wicked,” the Man with the Ladder confessed. “They are not suitable for a young girl growing up.”
“Sometimes they get a little tangled,” the girl acknowledged, “but I like them because they make God very interesting, whereas most of the stories I hear make him plodding and dull. And they are very respectful in their own way. He is always powerful and usually thoughtful about what he is doing. And, its clear to me,” she said, very seriously, “that you like God.”
The Man with the Ladder was pleased with the description. “I’ve already told you the only story about God that I know is true for certain,” he said.
“Well, how about a maybe-true story,” girl responded.
“This may be more like an almost-maybe-true story.” The Man with the Ladder moved down from the top of the Ladder and hunkered on one of the rungs near the bottom just in case God should get really angry and roll something down on him. “The only other story I know that is remotely possibly true is about God playing…”
“Does God play?” the little girl interrupted.
“Of course, honey,” the Man with the Ladder said, “Look around.” He led her glance around the park with his index finger, pointing out people doing what people do in a park. “Most of everything you see tells you God is very playful. And sometimes he plays seriously. He always played poker seriously.”
“God plays poker,” the little girl said in amazement.
“Among other games. Of course it’s a God like poker game but poker nonetheless.”
“What’s poker?” Tatanya Schwarz asked.
“A card game. Like War or Old Maid. God always played poker very seriously. God loves to gamble.”
“Who did he gamble with?”
“His cronies.”
“I thought he was God,” the little girl said thoughtfully.
“He is. Our God. And everyone on earth loves him and respects him in one form or another. But that does not mean that he is the only God of everything everywhere. I mean he might even be more powerful than other Gods of other worlds, although that’s sometimes in dispute. But he certainly has cronies.”
“Other Gods,” the little girl commented.
“Other deities, divinities and cosmic beings. As long as a entity can produce what passes a genuine act of God, like a flood or an earthquake, they count as a deity. Our God knows most of them. They work creating and destroying things furiously for six days and on the seventh day, or what passes as a day for them, they rest and play. Mostly they gamble.”
“Why poker?”
“Why not? Of course God and his cronies had a lot of different ways of gambling, and poker was only one of them.”
“What other ways of gambling did they have?” the little girl asked.
“Oh,”the Man with the Ladder said, “they bet on things.”
“On what things?” Tatanya asked.
“They bet on evolution a lot. They would pick a species and bet on how it would evolve. Evolution is very hard to predict and a lot of unlikely and improbable interesting things happen when something is evolving. It’s something cosmic entities feel very comfortable betting on.”
“What else did they bet on?” the little girl inquired.
“Sometimes they would play a gambling game called Genee. They would make a heap of genes on the ground and every deity would take a handful of genes from this pile and one of them would start by laying down a few genes and then the next player would lay out another handful and they would go on and on until one of them would say enough.”
“Why would he say enough?” the little girl asked.
“Because he thought they had enough. Do you know much about genes?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“No,” the little girl said.
The Man with the Ladder relaxed. “Well genes are like a lot of other things. When you have enough you have enough, you never need more than enough. Then they would bet on whether the creature the genes made up could walk or crawl or fly or burrow in the ground, and which direction it would think was up, and whether it could see radio waves—all sorts of things.”
“They don’t sound like interesting games,” Tatanya said.
“Well they are more or less adult games and you have to acquire a taste for them by growing up,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Sometimes they played this game called Lazy.”
“How do you play Lazy?” Tatanya asked.
“Well they would pick a galaxy that none of the players were gods of and they would pick out a world in that galaxy and then each of then would try to change it completely with as little effort—as lazily—as possible.”
“It doesn’t sound like an interesting game, either,” the little girl announced.
“Oh, but it was,” the Man with the Ladder said. “It was a lot of fun. And they usually bet a lot on it. In fact, that is the game that brought the God we love and respect his fame.”
“What did he do to become famous?”
“Well most of his deity and cosmic entity cronies were, how should I put it, high-strung and not very sensitive. They were used to getting what they wanted and NOW. Their favorite technique for changing a world was to hit it with a comet or shake it up with earthquakes. But our God was subtle and elegant. He changed the world entirely with…”
“With what?” the little girl asked.
“I was just going to tell you,” the Man with the Ladder said. “With the beating of a butterfly’s wings. Of course he first had to evolve the butterfly but that didn’t take much effort. Evolution works with very little effort which is why they liked to bet on it. Then, when he had evolved it, he spent a little time positioning it just right. That did take some work. But after he had evolved it and after he had set it flying just right, one beat of its wings and the world changed completely. Not right away of course but over time. It was spectacular. All of the rest of the deities, his cronies, were really impressed. He won a lot.”
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Tatanya Schwartz said, screwing up her nose. “Why would God need money?”
“Who said anything about money,” the Man with the Ladder asked. He squinted at the girl quizzically. “I didn’t say anything about money.”
“Well that’s all my grandfather ever gambled for,” she replied, “money.”
“Well God and his cronies are different. They don’t need money. The idea of money was always a little mysterious and scary to them. No, they played for different stakes.”
“Like what,” the little girl wanted to know.
“Different things. Sometimes the stakes were some deity’s particularly adoring group of believers. For instance do you know that our God is the God of a very religious group of plants on a far away planet that he won in a game of Genee. They are very devoted.”
“Plants,” Tatanya said, astounded.
“Plants, they look like giant daffodils,” the Man with the Ladder repeated solemnly. “Very orthodox, very devoted,” he said. “Sometimes,” the Man with the Ladder continued, “they played for the right to rain down plagues and pestilence on the losing god’s favorite followers. It was always a bother because, if a deity lost one of those bets, there were a million creatures praying up a storm and making a beseeching ruckus until he had go and set things right again. It was a real pain. They played very hard when the stakes were plagues and pestilences. A lot of the time they played for some juicy thing that one of them created. God’s cronies were not a very imaginative lot but occasionally they came up with something really interesting—mostly by evolution of course.”
“Like what,” Tatanya wanted to know.
“The best illustration is sex but you are only six,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“I know about sex,” the little girl said, “They teach us about sex in kindergarten and about condoms and Aids in the first grade and in the second grade…”
“I get the idea,” the Man with the Ladder acknowledged unhappily. “I didn’t know anything about sex until I was…well older.”
“What about sex?” the little girl asked.
“When I happen to know that our God, the God we love and admire won sex with the butterfly in a game of Lazy a gillion years ago. He won it from a god of a galaxy light years away. At that time sex belonged to a species of giant armored sloths.”
“What happened to the giant armored sloths?” the little girl inquired, her voice tinged with sympathy.
“I wouldn’t worry about them,” the Man with the Ladder said. “They hardly noticed it was missing and spent the few minutes of the time they were awake each century licking leaves and blowing kisses to each other.”
“What about the story?” the little girl asked.
“I was just coming to it,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I really was. Well, God was bragging about how he had made this new sun and planets that he balanced on the edge of chaos. It was that sun,” he pointed up at the sun which was high in the sky, “and the planet we are on was one of the planets. And God was boasting about how he balanced everything on a razors edge, on one side complete, cosmic craziness, on the other, total, frozen, icy order, and that they stood there spinning and spinning. And he was crowing that everything in it was balanced just right and that he hardly had to make any adjustments.”
“Adjustments?” the little girl repeated, making the word into a question.
“Well after deities made anything there were always adjustments, like salt and pepper,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“Like glasses, and makeup,” the little girl added.
“Exactly,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Now God said this very loudly and he was pretty sure things were going pretty well, but the truth was after he made it he hadn’t looked in or in for a long time and it was a chance to check things out. He invited all of his cronies along. He told them there would probably be a lot of things to bet on so they were enthusiastic. It turned out the earth, our earth, had a lot of interesting animals on it but mostly different kinds of dinosaurs and cockroaches and some pretty ugly sea animals. And the first thing they did when they got here was to start betting on things.”
“My Rabbi says…” the little girl began, noticing a run in the fabric of the story.
“Oh you can’t trust Rabbis for the straight poop all of the time although most of the time they have interesting things to say.”
“He said that God never had time for other things than watching over people’s lives. I heard it on television too.”
“Oh no,” the man with the Ladder said. “I know for a fact that most of God’s work is done in instants of time that are very small, smaller than the instants of time the chips in computers use to do their work. You know how fast they work,” he said.
“No, I don’t,” the little girl insisted. “I’m only six.”
“I don’t know either,” the Man with the Ladder confessed, “only very fast. Much faster than her,” he said pointing to a twelve year old on a skateboard flying by.
Tatanya was impressed. “If he works that fast he must be really fast.”
“And that’s not as fast as a little girl growing up,” the Man with the Ladder added.
“Where did they play?” Tatanya added looking for something to add a touch of realism to the story.
“Well it was a long time ago. But it was very close to here. There, I think” the Man with the Ladder said pointing to a clump of benches set in a circle. “Anyhow, they were betting on when different species would become extinct. God was losing but only because one of his cronies cheated. It was the deity that had lost sex in the game of Lazy and he was still ticked off about it. God had put his money on the dinosaurs for at least another fifty million years of evolution and he saw them turning out very wise and gentle—and this deity cheated.”
“How did the deity cheat?” the little girl wanted to know.
“He shifted the path of a comet ever so slightly. He made believe he had a frog in his throat—even though frogs hadn’t evolved on earth yet—and coughed in the right direction. They were taking a break ready to get back to the game and POW.”
“POW,” the little girl repeated.
“POW, a comet hit the earth and goodby dinosaurs. God was really miffed but he held his power.”
“What did he do?” Tatanya asked.
“Just for spite he made us, because this crony was betting on cockroaches.”
“Yuk,” the little girl said.
“That was Gods feeling exactly. When no one was looking he made some twist in a chromosome and the cockroaches didn’t evolve a jot, just did cockroach things for aeons and God ratcheted up the sun a little and let our way back ancestors, who were little rat like, furry animals, bask in the energy. And God and his cronies bet for a while on different kinds of worms and the little ratty things became us or close enough to us so that you couldn’t tell the difference. After God’s cronies watched a while, this cheating deity said, “I see you gave them sex.”
“Oh, yes,” God said, rubbing it in. “A lot.”
“But I noticed you didn’t give them much intelligence,” the cheating deity remarked.
“Enough,” God said.
“Just about enough to let them come in out of the rain. I bet if you gave them any real intelligence they would blow themselves out of the water and throw the whole world out of balance into chaos almost immediately.”
“I bet I could give them a lot more intelligence than your armored sloths and the world would stay in balance,” God retorted.
“Yeah,” his crony said, “with you making adjustments all over the place. An earthquake here, a comet there, to keep things balanced.”
“No,” God said, speaking very slowly, so all the other deities and cosmic forces with their hands full of genes and their eyes following the evolution of one species or another could hear, “I bet I could keep this world in balance with… with… with the beating of butterfly’s wings,” he said.
“Lets me get this straight,” his cheating crony said. “You’ll give them a lot more intelligence than my armored sloths, and sex to boot, and you’ll correct all of the havoc and chaos they create with the beating of butterfly’s wings.”
“Right,” our God said. “What are the stakes?” God asked. “What should we play for?”
“If you lose I get sex back,” his crony said, “they’re running it into the ground,” he grumbled, “and I get the orthodox plants back.”
“And if I win,” God added, “double, double pestilence and plagues.”
“Done.”
“So that was the bet,” the Man with the Ladder said. “What do you think?”
“I guess our God won because…” The little girl didn’t get to finish the sentence.
“Don’t move,” the Man with the Ladder said suddenly, “not a jot, not a fraction of inch.”
Tatanya froze. A butterfly flitted around her head.
“That was close,” the Man with the Ladder with the Ladder said. “An adjustment, I am sure of it,” he added.
“I hope he wins soon,” Tatanya sighed. “Growing up wouldn’t have much to recommend it if we lost some things,” she said a little anxiously.
“I agree,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I am sure things will turn out right. You just have to be careful when butterflies are around.”
“When do you think we’ll know for sure?” the little girl asked.
“Any day now,” the Man with the Ladder said, “any day now, I’m sure we’ll know for sure,” and they heard the familiar cry of Tatanya’s mother saying, “look what treats I’ve brought.”
§
The Man with the Ladder had some odd habits. Over the years his friends had put moss over them, and manured and watered them regularly, meaning they had grown used to them.
But, perhaps because they were his own habits, the Man with the Ladder never felt comfortable with them. They had a foreign and alien feel to them as if they were second hand habits whose original owner had been an immigrant from a planet in a different galaxy. When he looked at any one of them, it was easy to convince himself that it was sensible and served some useful purpose, but taken collectively they made up an indescribable, inexplicable strangeness. They drove him to the conclusion that he was unavoidably and irremediably queer, in a very queer way.
Even when he disowned them and tried to slip away from them, his
habits flew in his face and hovered around him like bats that had been
disturbed while nesting. For instance, many people liked parks. Reb Dunzel was
very fond of all of
On his day off he would often get up very early in the morning, at five or six, and drag his ladder to his favorite park which was a distance from his home. At two or three in the afternoon he would return home and do whatever chores were waiting. He would take a nap. Then he would hoist his ladder onto his shoulders and set out for the park again and stay until it got dark.
Reb Dunzel who was all sensibility, never saw this as queer, only not sensible. He raised the issue with him one day. “Why bother going out twice,” he said to the Man with the Ladder. “If you went out at ten or eleven, you could stay all afternoon and come home earlier, and you wouldn’t have to drag that misshapen stump of a tree (which is what he called the ladder) back and forth.” The ladder was one piece of grotesquerie that embarrassed him.
“You’re probably right,” he told his friend, “but the park has tides and seasons even though they are miniature tides and seasons. Most people don’t know about them because they are only morning park people or afternoon park people,” adding that the only way to experience these changes was to spend the equivalent of the parks year sitting and watching them come and go, preferably on a ladder. It was true enough, and for a long time it had been nothing but the truth, but it had not been the whole truth for while.
This split shift visiting the park was a habit of his. He seldom asked himself why, not because he wasn’t curious, but because he hated to lie to himself about as much as he hated to answer this particular question with the truth; and he never quite knew which he would tell himself until the words came out of his mouth. Then he would feel guilty or he would feel upset, but he would feel bad either way.
The real reason he went to the park so early in the morning and stayed until it got dark was that he was hunting graffiti artists, and he was hunting them in the park. As he knew he would, he always felt upset after he acknowledged this truth.
His favorite spot for hunting was a wall at the side of the park about 12 feet high that ran fifty feet or so before it dissolved into fence. One side of the wall belonged to the park, the other side belonged to the neighborhood that surrounded the park.
The park’s wall formed a part of the children’s playground and Jungle Jims jutted out from it at irregular intervals, relics from a time when creative climbing was the order of the day. At regular intervals at its base, were imaginary beaches and real sand.
From early morning to late afternoon, this part of the park was colonized by a gabble of mothers who watched over their children from benches like lifeguards watching non-swimmers wading in shark infested waters. They were suspicious of anyone over the age of twelve who did not have a youngster on some visual leash. The Man with the Ladder was not entirely immune to suspicion, but odd as he was, the sense of strangeness and danger had been leached out of him over time. He had been adopted as collective group father, and occasionally was pressed into duty as an emergency lifeguard.
The other side of the wall was owned by the neighborhood surrounding the park, and while the residents of the neighborhood didn’t use the park much, they used the wall fully and completely. It was employed as a combination bulletin board, gossip column and art gallery.
One could read the entire premarital history of half a dozen couples on one part. Another section contained all you would want to know about who was putting what, to whom in Russian, Ukrainian and Spanish with footnotes in English. And on a third, one could see an exhibition of the work of three neighborhood graffiti artists. It was the fact that the wall carried graffiti that attracted the Man with the Ladder to it. It was here that he hunted graffiti artists; common sense led him to hunt them from the park side of the wall.
He was ambivalent about graffiti. He told himself that he appreciated art wherever it appeared. On the other, hand he wished graffiti artists would make a finer distinction between frame and ground. He knew the distinction was being redefined, formally and informally, not only on the wall but in more distinguished surroundings, but he wished it would be redefined quickly, because the transition was driving him crazy.
When the only thing he could see out of the subway window was the backsides of the first two initials of the name of the artist who had redecorated the outside of the car he was riding in, or when he needed to check a subway map and found that the stops on the BMT had been integrated into a bouquet of flowers and he misread the blossoms and missed his stop and ended up somewhere else in Brooklyn that he could not get home from, he was ready to perform intaglio upon the artists bare backs, or acquatint their posteriors.
Graffiti was as common in the city as the cockroach, but graffiti
artists were as rare as griffins. He knew an odd gallery owner on the
On his days off, when the air was dry and not severely sunny, he would get up early and drag his ladder to the park to hunt graffiti artists.
He hunted them from the park side of the wall, sitting as high up on the wall as he could. If he stood on the top rung of the ladder he could peer over the wall and see them, at least from the top. He felt that seeing and hearing them at work would be enough of a trophy to justify the hunt, although he had fantasies about striking up a conversation with them over the wall, hoping that, separated from him by the anonymity of concrete, they might feel safe enough to talk.
He had been hunting graffiti artists for almost a year before he actually caught one (or two as it happened). It was a dry, warm spring day. The sun had already heaved itself slowly up and he had watched it snake its way between the trees and over statues to splash sloppily on his face.
He had pretty much resigned himself to merely observing the park’s tides and seasons that day, when he heard something on the other side of the wall that he knew immediately was the sound of the quarry he had been doggedly pursuing.
Listening was one thing the Man with the Ladder was good at. “If you are good at listening,” he told himself, “it doesn’t make a difference what you hear.” It was a blessing that he was a good listener because, whoever these graffiti artists were, their voices hugged the wall and, at first, what they were saying was dry and dull.
They discussed the placement of their painting and some technical questions. He caught only phrases like, “the wall’s dirty there,” or “can you reach that far up,” or “wipe it off, spray over it, don’t disturb that” and similar snatches of what he took to be graffiti artists’ technical talk.
After his ear had accustomed itself to the high pitched sound of voices, it was easier to pick out the conversation from the background noises. He still had to struggle to make out the words over the swishing of the paint, but he was sure he heard one of the spray painters say, “Graffiti is three dimensional wisdom on a two dimensional wall.”
He thought to himself that this was a sophisticated thing to say so early in the morning, particularly on the neighborhood’s side of the wall, but the reply was just as urbane. “I always thought that graffiti is wisdom on a wall that’s only wide enough to hold information.”
The Man with the Ladder had not been prepared to hear anything of the sort and he listened with amazement as the two spray painters carried on this dialogue in sing song voices.
“I always thought that wisdom is just intelligence waiting for a situation to happen in,” said the first.
“Nah,” said the second, “wisdom is just intelligence waiting for a person to happen to.”
“Same thing,” said the first
“Not at all,” retorted the second.
The Man with the Ladder had always thought of graffiti artists as inarticulate people who only talked with cans of paint, and he was a little disturbed to find them so facile with words that they encroached, unselfconsciously, on what he felt was clearly literary ground. What disturbed him even more was that he was certain that what he was hearing were the voices of children.
The Man with the Ladder knew that if they caught him looking at them they would run away, but he calculated that if he were very careful and climbed quietly to the very top of the ladder and peered over the top of the wall, he could see them without too much of a risk of being seen. He hesitated a moment because he did not want to be the cause of a loss of a masterpiece. He took his shoes off and tied them together and put them carefully around his neck, as he had seen someone do in a movie, and slithered up to the top of the ladder and peered over the top.
He almost swallowed his shoes. Below him on the other side of the wall were two girls, no more from the top than twelve or thirteen and probably no more than twelve or thirteen from the side or front either, he thought. The one on the right side of the wall was a black adolescent. Her companion looked a little smaller and had pig tails. The black girl was on a skate board.
“Graffiti,” she said, as if she was making the definitive pronouncement, “is a one person dialogue.”
“I always thought of graffiti as a two person monologue,” chimed in her pal.
“OK, OK,” said skate board, “what shall we paint today”?
“How about a list of the symptoms of herpes,” pig tails replied. “Art should do public service.”
“No,” said the second. “How about,’To recover from an incurable illness tempts fate unnecessarily.’”
“You’re getting too intellectual,” the first complained laughing.
“You might as well write ‘A poor person getting a rich mans disease commits a
crime punishable by a cure that works only on Wednesday at
“That can only be typed, not sprayed,” came back as a reply.
“Skip it,” said the white girl.
“How about something short so we can go to McDonalds for breakfast. “Intelligence sucks,” was her suggestion.
“And wisdom spits out,” came the retort very quickly.
“Nah,” said her companion thinking a moment, “if there’s one thing people can`t stand it’s premenstrual intelligence.”
The Man with the Ladder watched as they flopped down on the ground.
“How about graffiti is wall smarts?” came anonymously from one of the relaxed artists.
The black girl tucked her hand under her head and sprawled on the curb in front of the wall. “You know,” she said thinking out loud,” I think I know what it is for a person to be wise, but what wisdom would be for an animal, I can’t figure out.”
“That’s easy,” came the reply,” as long as you can say what kind of an animal.”
“How about an ant,” challenged her companion.
There was silence for a little while.
“I think I got it,” said the smaller of the two prone figures. “Wisdom for an ant would be not to walk on sidewalks even if the cracks were filled with candy and cookies.” After a moment, the sound of spraying began.
The Man with the Ladder sat down abruptly. Suddenly the urge and desire to see and hear graffiti artists had abandoned him. He was filled with a kind of fear of children who could move words around so facilely. He realized that, face to face with an adult, they would revert to adolescents, interested in adolescent things and behaving exactly as they were expected behave. But, spying on them in their native habitat and hearing them talk, unencumbered by the burden of conforming to adult expectations, made him afraid.
He sat quietly for a moment trying to recover his equilibrium. The sun had come up and he was bathed in the full light of the day, and while it calmed him, it took him longer to reclaim his sense of purpose than he thought it would. He sat there until the silence from the other side absolutely convinced him that the two graffiti artists had left. For some reason he couldn’t explain, he was trembling as he folded his ladder and shifted it to his shoulder and rushed to see what they had sprayed on the wall.
His first response was disappointment. In the place they had prepared and covered so carefully were two names, Cindy and Jane. He stared at them for a long time before he noticed that, hanging between the names, pinned to each by a leg, was a finely crafted ant, no bigger than his hand and impossible to have been spray painted, he thought, but there none the less.
The Man with the Ladder went home early that day and by its end he began to cultivate the notion that hardly any of what he thought he had heard had really been said; and that he was such a good listener that he had filled in the noise and blanks in the conversation of twelve year olds with fragments and bits of ideas that had come from his own head. By the day’s end, he had raised a doubt in his mind about whether they were children at all. He began to think that they were very old academics doing morning exercises, and that his position on the ladder had distorted their appearance.
A few days after the hunting episode he believed he had found the explanation for what he was certain was a convincing, self induced delusion. He was sure that what had happened was that, after work one day, he had passed the wall and seen two girls names on it and had, out of the worst of his odd habits, constructed a story in his mind about how they got there; and that on the ladder in the park, on his day off, he had let his imagination add enough detail to a prosaic and unexceptional event to remove the stigma that his unconscious associated with the quixotic notion of hunting graffiti artists. When he provided himself this long but well reasoned account, he was pleased and certain he had found the explanation for what was a disturbing memory.
He decided however, to make sure, to make a detour from work one day to confirm his almost gelled conviction that the episode was almost completely a product of his imagination. When he saw the two names on the wall, just as his explanation had placed them, he was relieved. The fact that there was no ant between them calmed him more and he was ready to put the cover on the box of the episode when for some reason he couldn’t fathom later, an accident, a trick of fate, he looked below and off to the side of the names. And there was the ant. It had clearly moved and was heading very slowly, inexorably, undeterably for the sidewalk.
§
The Man with the Ladder was in the park crumpled up on a bench, his ladder folded by his feet when Reb Dunzel and the Reb’s wife, Sister Greb, came over to him.
“You don’t seem quite yourself today,” Reb Dunzel said, “it’s hard to see you clearly.”
“I’m not… not…” he said hesitantly, “not quite myself.”
“You look awful,” Sister Greb added, trying to bring the image of the Man with the Ladder into focus. “There seem to be three or four of you wriggling around.” Her husband nodded in agreement. “Your hands are clear enough and part of your chest is solid but the rest of you seems to be jiggling back and forth like mourners at a wake. You’ve got to hold still,” she said, “I’m getting dizzy.”
“I’m totally disassembled, completely unscrewed,” the Man with the Ladder admitted. “I’ve been searching for someone for days and have not caught a glimpse of them, not a peek.”
“For whom,” Reb Dunzel asked.
The Man with the Ladder creaked as he unpacked himself from the bench and straightened up.
“I found this eye,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“How horrible,” Reb Dunzel said.
“Not a real eye,” the Man with the Ladder explained, “only a drawing of a woman’s eye, a piece of a portrait.”
“A piece of a portrait,” Sister Greb said. “That seems only a little less horrible. How do you know it’s a woman’s eye if you only found an eye.”
“It’s a woman’s eye,” the Man with the Ladder said, “trust me, I know.”
“So,” Reb Dunzel asked, waiting for the part of the story that would explain the Man with the Ladder’s appearance and how he knew it was a woman’s eye.
“After I found this eye…”
“Drawing of an eye,” Sister Greb corrected.
“After I found this drawing of an eye, I spent a day in the park looking for other pieces of this woman. I found three of them: a sliver of chin, a chip of nose, a portion of cheek.”
“Not enough to really pin a woman down,” Reb Dunzel commented.
“Most men think they can define a woman by a lot less,” Sister Greb said sharply. “For some men a bump or two is enough, even less than a bump,” she mused, “a place where a bump might be, the dip of a curve….”
“Enough,” the Man with the Ladder said forcefully, “enough to fix her in my head. I can’t sleep. I get up early and rush to the park and walk back and forth, searching for the woman whose eye I found. My ladder has never been so heavy. Most of me—the sensible parts—desperately want to get some sleep, but another part of me insists on paroling the park in case she shows up.”
“It’s not sensible,” Reb Dunzel commented.
“It seems like this imagined woman really broke you up into pieces,” Sister Greb said.
“I don’t blame her,” the Man with the Ladder mumbled in response. “It’s not her fault that…that most of us are a fractious crowd of distantly related strangers, locked in the same body and answering to the same name but with not much else in common. One speaks English and another listens in Hungarian, one likes shade, another sun, one avoids risks but another likes adventure, and each of them wants something different out of the same 24 hour day. I’m sure she didn’t know that her eye would drive them further apart.”
“But in most people one part does not drag all of the other parts on crusades,” Reb Dunzel remarked.
“Keeping one’s insides in order is difficult,” the Man with the Ladder acknowledged in a low whisper as if not to antagonize the pieces contending in him.
“For some people keeping their insides in order is impossible,” Reb Dunzel repled softly.
“The face…” the Man with the Ladder started.
“The pieces of the face,” Sister Greb said.
“The pieces of the face have disorganized me completely,” the Man with the Ladder complained. “Most of me is indifferent and bored. A few parts are curious and a few are absolutely hostile. But there’s one part of me that is totally obsessed with finding this woman.”
“What about ‘YOU’?” Sister Greb asked. “You know ‘YOU.’” She pointed at him.
“That’s the problem,” the Man with the Ladder replied. “I don’t seem to be able to hold a quorum of me together long enough to get a sense of what ‘ME’ wants. The part of me that wants this woman won’t listen. It’s exhausting.”
Reb Dunzel and his wife looked at one another. “You could use some advice,” Reb Dunzel said.
“Really good advice,” his wife added.
“The Zen master,” they said in unison, “you need the kind of advice that he would give.”
As if he had been called, they saw the Zen master followed by his two apprentices coming up the path toward them.
He stopped in front of the Man with the Ladder and looked at him casually. “Hunting, I see.”
“Yes,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“And badly,” the Zen Master added. He put down the bag he carried, stood up on his toes and stuck his face in the Man with the Ladder’s face. Although the Man with the Ladder towered above him he put his arms under his armpits and gripped him tightly as if to lift him up. “If you are hunting a woman only whose eye you have met, you are going about it in absolutely the wrong way.”
“How did… ?”
“You want hows,” the Zen Master said, “here’s a how. The only way to catch a person whose eye has chased and pursued you,” the Zen Master continued, jiggling his arms, “the only way to hunt such a creature is to have them come to you,” After he said this, he released the Man with the Ladder from his grip, picked up his bag and walked off.
“How do I do that?” the Man with the Ladder yelled at him as he waddled away but the Zen master did not turn, although his disciples waved back gayly. “How do I do that,” he asked Reb Dunzel and his wife who had watched the zen master’s performance. “What did he mean? What should I do?”
“Well, if she is your kind of crazy, I mean if she is in the same state, more or less, bite of the dog, you know…” Reb Dunzel mumbled.
The Man with the Ladder’s face collapsed into a confused jumble of features. He waited for Reb Dunzel to continue.
“I think what the Zen Master was trying to say,” Sister Greb interrupted, “is that if you want to catch an elusive prey such as a woman you only know in fragments, you have to make her come after you. Rip up a picture of yourself. Put the pieces out in the park and see if they attract her.”
Before she finished the sentence the Man with the Ladder had turned and was running. “Watch my ladder for a few minutes will you,” he said over his shoulder.
When he came back a quarter of a an hour later he looked even more exhausted and disappointed and a bit confused. “They won’t,” he blurted out.
“Who, won’t what?” Sister Greb asked.
“They won’t, they, the portrait painters. The portrait painters who hang out near the entrance of the park,” he elaborated. “They won’t draw my portrait. I asked them to draw my portrait but they wanted to know why after 12 years of lounging around the park portraitless, I suddenly wanted my face drawn and I told them I wanted to rip it up and they refused. They didn’t listen to anything I said after that. I offered them twice as much as they usually get for a portrait but they still refused. ‘Artistic integrity. Ripping up was an insult,’ they said. Did anything go on with the ladder?” he asked as he collapsed on the bench.
“Nothing,” Reb Dunzel said.
“You’re sure?” the Man with the Ladder asked. “No one with a distinctive eye came around looking for me or hanging around the ladder as if they were waiting for someone to run into them?”
“No.”
The Man with the Ladder sank on the bench and part of him stretched out, and part of him curled up rigid and tense.
“Well I’m sorry we weren’t able to help,” Sister Greb said after a few minutes. “Try to get some sleep,” Reb Dunzel added as they walked off.
“No, you helped a lot,” the Man with the Ladder replied.
Three days passed before Reb Dunzel got to the park again. He found the Man with the Ladder on his favorite bench in almost the in the same position he and his wife had left him in.
“You look worse than before,” Reb Dunzel said, as cheerfully as he could.
The Man with the Ladder worked at shrugging but managed to lift up only one shoulder weakly. “After the portrait painters refused to draw my face I went home and drew my own portrait,” he volunteered.
“I didn’t know you could draw,” Reb Dunzel said in amazement.
“I can’t,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I guess the part of me that is interested in drawing doesn’t have the talent for it, but the part interested in, in…”
“The woman…” his friend added.
“The woman,” the Man with the Ladder repeated, “can draw. Of course he hasn’t had a lot of practice.”
“He, who?” Reb Dunzel asked innocently.
“The who of me who wants to find that woman. The point of the pencil kept breaking and my fingers got really sore. But in the end I had a self portrait.”
“So you can draw.”
“A part of me can draw, not me,” the Man with the Ladder said in an annoyed rasp. “I still can’t draw a straight line. You know my scrawl,” he reminded his friend.
“But you drew a self portrait,” Reb Dunzel protested.
“Bait. A likeness,” the Man with the Ladder said, “Actually, better than a good likeness. It was crude, sort of a children’s drawing. But it was me. In fact, it made me look a little more handsome than I am, a little more serious, a little more…” He searched for the word, “whole. But, before I could think about it, I ripped it into little pieces and put them in a paper bag and came to the park where I set them out.” He pointed to the section of the park that lay before them which was a patchwork of grassy sections and reddish exposed dirt. The white pieces of the Man with the Ladder’s portrait were laid out like a maze that would funnel anyone following the pieces to the bench on which he sat. They stood out sharply. “A trap,” he whispered. “I have been waiting here since then.”
“It was cold last night,” Reb Dunzel commented.
“I know,” the Man with the Ladder said with a shiver. The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel stared at the Man with the Ladder’s handiwork. “I don’t know why it hasn’t worked,” the Man with the Ladder said quietly.
“Perhaps the Zen master could tell you. Why don’t you go and ask him. Or stand still and you can ask him because here he’s coming towards us now.” Reb Dunzel said this warily because the Zen master’s habit of showing up when his presence was desired unnerved him.
“I don’t think you got my idea quite right,” the Zen Master said, following the Man with the Ladder’s gaze to the pieces of his portrait laid out carefully before him. He set down his sack.
The Man with the Ladder protested weakly. “You said I should get the woman to come to me. I set a trap for the woman I am hunting with pieces of my portrait.” He pointed in front of him. “That’s what you said.”
“More or less,” the Zen Master murmured under his breath.
“What exactly do you mean, more or less?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“I mean,” the Zen master said very softly, picking up his sack again, “to catch anything with that method you’ve got to let go of the bait.”
“Oh,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Oh.” He leaped up and set off picking up all of the pieces of the self portrait he had so carefully laid out. Reb Dunzel watched as he stuck them in his pocket set off running again toward the middle of the park. “I’ve got something to do,” he yelled, “I’ll see you soon, later, tomorrow.”
When he met Reb Dunzel the next day in the park the first words out of his mouth were, “it worked, but…” He still looked dejected and miserable but his outline was definite and Reb Dunzel had no problem seeing only one of him clearly.
“What do you mean it worked, but…”
“Just that, it worked—but.” He gestured to his friend to sit down on the bench. “After the Zen Master told me what I was doing wrong, I gathered the pieces of my portrait and went to the center of the park and scattered them in the air. Then I came back here to wait. The part of me that was desperately seeking the woman was exhausted and finally fell asleep and the rest of me had a chance to think things through without having to get up constantly and shuffle around in case she might be sitting somewhere else in the park.” He sighed. “I realized that I did not like the part of me that wanted so desperately to meet the woman whose eye I found. It was a part of me that was selfish and arrogant and demanding. It was single-minded and uncompromising and didn’t care less what happened to, to the rest of me. Even if it could draw, it couldn’t smell the flowers or the trees, It only wanted that woman.”
“I think you are being a little hard on yourself,” Reb Dunzel said.
“Not myself, not me, at least not all of me,” the Man with the Ladder said. He stopped talking and looked around at the trees. “I realized that if I met that woman, the ups and downs of every day living would stop and life would be one constant stream of pleasure because just looking at her would fill me with intense joy. Being by her side would satisfy all of my cravings. There would be no other unsatisfied needs, no other hungers.
“The part of me that desired her was not interested in anything else. He would live off of her. And I gathered that she, or the part of her that had organized this hunt for a partner, was the same. That part of me would begrudge every other part of me the least pleasure. He is not interested in corkscrews or literary discussions, or Zen masters or conversation, or stories. No, he would feast on the woman and she on him, all of the time. Everything other than each other would be an unwelcome intrusion on paradise.”
Reb Dunzel sucked in his breath and waited.
“Yesterday. I saw her. She came into the park and walked to that bench there. He pointed to a bench close by but facing in the other direction. The rest of her was as beautiful as her eye. She did not see me but sat down and waited. I could see that she was confident that I would come. From looking at her, I could tell she was clever and smart.”
“How can you tell from looking that someone is clever and smart?” Reb Dunzel wanted to know.
“I don’t know, I just knew,” the Man with the Ladder said.
Reb Dunzel knew something not nice was coming.
The Man with the Ladder continued mechanically as if he were retelling an event that had occurred to some character in a children’s story. “The part of me that had been searching for her was still sleeping so I thought very quietly so that I didn’t disturb him. If I meet her she will be as wonderful as her portrait and she will have a magic that will make the mundane extraordinary. But it will be magic for part of me and the rest of me, all the other parts of me, will shrivel up and die. Now all of these parts of me live under a permanent truce in an uneasy peace,” he said to Reb Dunzel, “but if I met her they would be exiled permanently to some paradisiacal gulag and die. I guess I must have shaken myself up because he woke up.”
“Who woke up?” Reb Dunzel asked, suddenly frightened.
“The part of me, the me that was searching for her. He saw her right away and grabbed for my legs and tried get me up and go to her.”
Reb Dunzel looked at him. “Your legs.”
“All the rest of me grabbed the seat of the bench and held on. I lifted my feet off of the ground.”
“He went wild, the piece of me that wanted her. He insisted, he demanded. He pleaded and cried. He screamed and threatened. He threw a tantrum and howled, I held onto the bench and closed my eyes as tightly as I could. He kept up his howling for what seemed like a long time but the last thing I heard was just a wimpering. Then there was just quiet. When I opened them she was gone and he was gone.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps he followed her, perhaps back where he came from. Perhaps he’s lurking behind some part of my gut, waiting to take a unthinkable revenge sometime, a heart attack, a stroke. I sat here for a while then I went home.” Everything around the two friends sitting in the park was quiet. The birds were silent and the trees waited for something more to be said before they moved their leaves.
The Man with the Ladder broke the silence. “Every once in a while I am rocked by a wave of relief but its always followed by a whispered, mocking voice that seems to say, ‘with each victory we mourn the death of possibility.’ And an eye seems to be following me,” he said out of the blue. “And then the twitch.”
“What twitch?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“My neck twists suddenly, a twitch, as if some part of me were scouring the neighborhood, in case she returned,” the Man with the Ladder said. “It’s an involuntary reflex. I expect it will go away in a little while,” he added.
“How about a cup of coffee and a croissant,” Reb Dunzel asked, after a proper silence.
“Not today,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I don’t really feel up to it. Perhaps tomorrow,” he said and turned, twitching, and headed home.
§
The Big Portrait: a shadow story
The Man with the Ladder had been displaced from his usual spot in the park because it had become a location for a movie. A film company had cordoned off the part of the park he usually hung out in and young people with walky talkies patrolled the periphery and told anyone not connected to the movie, politely at first, then insistently, that they could not go ‘there’ and had to go ‘somewhere else.’
He felt uncomfortable sitting on the ladder in an unfamiliar section of the park so he got down from his usual perch, set it down on its side and collapsed on a bench. He tried to put as good face on the eviction as he could, but the event cast a shadow on the day and he looked around for a girl in a tutu, which always was a sign to go home immediately, but he saw nothing. He tried to convince himself that it was an opportunity to explore areas of the park that he never visited but he could not quite make the case strongly enough to himself to get up from the bench.
Most people thought that a park was a park—that parks were homogeneous places—and any spot in a park was pretty much the same as any other spot in a park. The Man with the Ladder knew differently. Different parts of a park were as individual and distinct as the continents. Each breed of squirrel had its favorite fraction of the park. Flowers and shrubs that sprouted wildly in one tract were subdued and hugged the ground in another. Trees that were red and orange in the fall preferred one section of the park and those that shed their leaves all at once and stood naked and shivering for most of the year liked another. Even more than the animals and plants, people varied from parcel to parcel, and even the same people carried on differently when they were in different parts of the park.
Even the benches were set up differently in different sections of the park. In the area in which he was sitting, the benches were strung in slithering rows, back to back so that often you were sitting behind another person—or at lunch time, when the benches were crowded—a clump of two or three, which was the situation that he found himself in.
He occupied one of a sunny pair of benchs that were set back to back facing in opposite directions. He had laid his ladder down horizontally in front of him and propped up his feet on it so that it felt unfamiliar. But it had the desired effect of making him a little less conspicuous. Behind him were two old women, They had sat down after he was seated so he did not know what they looked like. But from their conversation he pieced together a picture of them. It was a picture formed entirely from sounds.
One of them was low and large, spherical, inflated and smooth, the other, short and high pitched, bony and wrinkly. They were eating something crunchy and sweet from a box that one of them had brought. Because the university abutted this end of the park, he suspected—although he had no evidence at all for the supposition—that they were two philosophers on their lunch break, dressed up as old ladies to avoid their students. Their conversation was about the things that old ladies talk about and it mingled with the sounds of the birds and cars and people walking.
“This is really good. Did you make it?” the rotund lady said.
“I don’t cook anymore,” the bony woman replied. “Nothing. Frozen food. The microwave is my friend. I’m afraid of the stove.”
“For tea, I boil bottled water,” came her companions response. “I’m afraid to turn on the tap.”
“I heard it from the most reliable of sources,” the rotund old lady said obliquely between crunches.
“From whom?” her friend asked, dubious.
“From someone you don’t know. But if you knew them…” Her voice
trailed off. “They have traveled everywhere,
“He found an eye in the park and fell in love with it.” Suddenly their voices crowded out all of the other sounds in the park. The Man with the Ladder could feel her companion shudder.
“How gruesome.”
The speaker hesitated. “A picture of an eye, not even a real eye. It was horrible enough. He was ready to leave his wife and children.”
“I didn’t know he had children.”
“Oh a lot of children. Three, maybe four or five. And he was ready to leave them in the lurch for this woman, not even a woman, a phantasm of whom he had seen only an eye.”
“I know men who are willing to leave their wives for even less. An eye does not surprise me.”
“Men are all ready to leave their wives for a glance of something or other.”
“What did your source say happened?”
“Well, he found this piece of a drawing of a woman’s face and fell in love with it and was getting ready to move out but thought he better find the person whose eye it was before he took such a drastic step.”
“Security.”
“Maybe….” She hesitated. The Man with the Ladder could feel the heavyset speaker shift her body so that she was facing her companion. “I guess so,” she finally agreed. “Security. So he spent the next few days in the park looking for the other pieces. He only found six or so.”
“I heard he had everyone in the park looking for pieces.”
“That’s what I heard also. But the person who told me the story never mentioned it. He never found more than seven or eight.”
“Why didn’t he put up a sign offering a reward. Someone is always posting pictures of lost pets, offering a reward.”
“He was afraid he would offend her. A woman of your dreams is not like a dog or cat or even a budgy. He went to the person who told me the story and asked for advice.”
“So,” her companion said after a while.
“So this person told him it was silly. Of course he wasn’t married and didn’t have three or four children and had never been in love so it wasn’t good advice.”
The listener mm’ed.
“But he persisted, so this person to whom he went for advice told him to make a picture of himself and scatter it in the park. Maybe the woman was crazy too.”
“And…”
“He did it.”
“So…”
“It worked. The woman found part of his nose, only a piece and fell in love with it. She was married too, with a lot of kids but ready to fly out of the coop too. And she went hunting him.”
“And how did it end,” the skiny woman asked after a little silence.
“Well, they were both hunting each other and one day he caught sight of her but he hesitated going to her. He felt suddenly foolish to have fallen in love with an eye. He could recognize the eye from a distance in a face he had never seen. He had to work up his nerve to confront the unknown whole person whose eye he had fallen in love with…”
“The children perhaps,” the thin woman added.
“And as he was sitting working up the courage…”
“These are very good,” the listener interrupted, crunching. “Where did you get them?”
“The bakery next to the dress shop.”
“On Fifth.”
“No, not that one. The one next to the butcher’s.”
“I wonder if they use butter or margarine. My mother insisted on butter but she died of heart disease. When I cooked, I always used margarine. They never tasted as good as my mother’s.”
The Man with the Ladder became impatient. ‘Finish the story for Gods sake,’ he muttered.
“Did you say something?” the heavy set woman said to his back, clearly annoyed at his pushiness.
“Clearing my throat,” the Man with the Ladder said without turning to look at her. The Man with the Ladder suddenly became afraid that they might leave before the story was finished so he sat very still and made himself small.
“As I was saying, he hesitated. He sat there trying to be rational.”
“A little late for that,” her companion observed.
“Just like a man,” the speaker replied. “He hesitated and tried to assess the uncertainties. He was very confused. There the eye was in front of him, waiting, and this was the time he took to evaluate the pros and cons of getting up and going to her.”
“Now he becomes rational,” her companion snickered.
“At the moment he decided to risk everything and go talk to her he saw a man walk up to her. He could see from her reaction that this man was a stranger but they talked, and as they talked a little child came up to them, then an old couple.”
“And…”
“As he watched a crowd grew around her and a friend of his came up to him and then another friend. He knew a lot of people in the park. And suddenly both of them were surrounded by large groups of people.”
“And…”
“and nothing. When he finally broke loose from the sticky crowd of his friends he saw her in the distance, this group of people surrounding her moving to the exit.”
“And he knew he would never see her again,” the thin old woman croaked.
“That s right, nevermore.”
“Like the poem. Serves him right. Rationality at the moment of decision. That’s not the way I heard it, though,” the bony woman said after a pause and some more crunching.” I heard…”
“Who from?”
“Someone. A shuft who hangs out in the park. A friend of his, someone who was there, in the thick of it. He seemed very reluctant to talk about it but in the end he blabbered all of it out. He couldn’t help it. A real gossip.”
“Reliable?” asked her companion.
“It’s more or less the same story. At least it begins the same.”
“A lot of stories begin the same.”
“Yes, that’s true. But it pretty much follows the same wandering path. He finds this eye.”
“A drawing of an eye.”
“Yes, and collects as many pieces of the face as he can find.”
“I told you.”
The Man with the Ladder could hear the ladies take a chewing and swallowing break.
“Up to the point where he is going to try to get her to come to him by scattering pieces of a drawing of his face. To see if she was his kind of crazy.”
“Whatever,” her companion replied.
“He rips up the drawing of his face and puts it in a brown paper bag and goes out into the middle of the park with this bag of pieces.”
“Look at that kite,” her companion interrupted suddenly. “It’s diving and rising is making a drawing in the sky.”
“You’re right. I can see…”
The Man with the Ladder tried to control himself but he could not. “Get on with it,” he muttered.
“Excuse me,” the storyteller said, not directing the comment anywhere in particular.
“Nothing,” the Man with the Ladder said, not moving. “The kite is making pretty pictures.” He said this although he could not see the kite behind him.
“They say that whenever you see a kite, God is scribbling someone’s fate on the sky in heaven,” the rotund woman said. “Like whenever you hear a bell… you know, angels and wings.”
The Man with the Ladder squirmed.
“As I was saying before noise got in my ear,” the storyteller continued, “he heads for the middle of the park with his hand in the paper bag…”
“To throw the pieces of the drawing of his own face into the air,” her companion said, just to be sure she had it right.
“And…”
“And he sees another man with a paper bag scattering pieces of paper to the wind.”
“Another man doing what he was going to do,” the listener commented. “That is interesting.”
“Exactly. He waited until this scattering man was done and went up to him. “What are you doing?” he asks, “not just littering without any purpose, I suppose.”
“I’m an artist,” the other man explained, sitting down on the ground exhausted. Then after a pause he looks excitedly into face of the man who had fallen in love with the eye, and says, “I’m an artist. A little while ago I drew this woman’s portrait.”
“From life?” the man with his hand still stuck in the brown paper bag asked.
“No, from my imagination. She just showed up in my imagination and I drew her portrait. After I drew it, I…”
“Fell in love with her,” the man with his hand in the bag said.
“Exactly. I knew my limitations. I knew I did not have enough imagination to create such a woman. I was sure she was real. I looked for her for a week when I thought I could announce that I loved her by scattering the pieces of her portrait in the park but it didn’t work. Then I got this idea that I would try to attract her to me by scattering pieces of a self portrait. Maybe she would come to me.”
“Another crazy,” the fleshy woman commented.
“The park is filled with them,” the storyteller added, “that’s what the film is about, crazies in the park.” She picked up the thread of the story. “Oh,” said the man with his hand in the paper bag. “Good luck,” he added unenthusiastically and walked off. By the time he got to the bench he hung out at, he felt foolish.
“His wife and children,” came the comment from the woman who was listening.
“No, that he did not have the brains to distinguish between reality and someone’s imagination. Art does that sometimes. It beguiles you.”
“What did he do?”
He dumped the paper bag with the pieces of his portrait into the nearest trash basket and went home and stayed out of the park for a few weeks.
“So?”
“So the day he comes back to the park who should he meet but the artist, the man he saw scattering pieces of a picture of himself in the park and…” The storyteller hesitated for dramatic effect. She brushed the crumbs off her lap and stood up.” It’s strange,” she said. “Sometimes the air in the park is fresh and clear, other times you can hardly breathe it, it is so dense and thick and saturated with…”
“Something,” her companion said, ominously. “Filled up completely with something. I’ve never figured out what it is.”
The Man with the Ladder was suddenly panicky and worried that they might leave without her finishing the story.
He heard the thin woman sit down again. She gathered her breath and continued. “The artist had this woman on his arm who looked at the other man, at first quizzically, then sadly, before she smiled. She smiled. It was the woman whose eye he had found and fallen in love with.”
“Yes. But the artist continued talking not giving him any time to think just then. ‘I had faith,’ the words bubbled out of him. ‘I believed and here she is.’ He presented her to the other man but did not give her name. The woman more or less curtsied, more like a little bow I think. It was very formal and it broke the other man’s heart. ‘We have to be going,’ the artist said and he and the woman walked off.”
The ladies got up. “It’s Monday,” one said, “Social Security. I’m off to the bank.”
“I’ll walk with you a while,” the other added and they set off.
The Man with the Ladder sat very still on the bench. Even when they were far away he did not turn to look at them. He sat still and the memories flooded back and he wondered who had told them the stories since he had not told anyone—and, as much as he could, kept the memories from himself.
As he sat there he wondered whether the experiences he thought his own were commonplaces and that this part of the park was filled with men who had terrible, unhappy love affairs with pieces of portraits, with eyes or cheeks of women they never met.
§
“I once knew a painter who determined to hunt down and trap his creativity,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“Why would he want to do that?” asked Tatanya Schwartz who was waiting for him to tell her a story.
“I’m not sure,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“You have some idea,” the little girl said. “You know you always have some idea.”
“Security, maybe.” The Man with the Ladder offered the hypothesis tentatively. “As a painter he completely depended upon his creativity and I think his dependence on this intimate, but unseen and un-met part of himself, unnerved and disturbed him. He could not figure out why it did what it did for him, or what it was really doing when it did it. He could not fathom what made it tick.”
“It did not seem to mind coming when it was called, or at least showing up when it was needed. It did not even demand regular hours off. But it insisted on serving at a distance, anonymously, as it were, a faceless free agent. And it absolutely resisted any contact more intimate than the assignment of its duties.”
“Creativity’s irrationality is art’s reason,” the little girl said.
The Man with the Ladder jumped involuntarily.” What did you say?” he asked the little girl, who was smiling.
“I read it on the back of a box of health cereal,” she said. “I’m not sure what it means, but it sounded nice, and now is the first time it ever seemed to fit into any conversation.”
“What ever happened to the children’s cereals that were soaked in sugar and had cartoons on the back of the box?” he asked. Everyone understood the question was rhetorical. “What you should have asked,” the Man with the Ladder continued, “was what good would come from his seeing it.”
“That’s just what I meant to ask,” the little girl replied. “What good would come from his seeing it?”
The Man with the Ladder thought for a minute. “I think he needed to make it see him as much as he wanted to see it,” he said. “This painter felt that if his creativity saw him, if he could force it to meet him face to face, in the flesh, so to speak, it would develop an affection for him, become bound to him, and it would become incapable of letting him down or betraying him. Of course, he was curious about what it looked like. Aren’t you?” he asked the girl.
She shrugged. “An aroused and agitated creativity is one of God’s fiercer creations,” she said definitively. “Same box of cereal,” she said in response to the Man with the Ladder’s perplexed look, and then, giving it a little more thought she said, “I think I would leave well enough alone.”
“Well, he didn’t. He set about trying to trap it. At first he set simple traps for it in different rooms of his house. He set them in a stuck drawer of his desk, near a burnt out light bulb, at the end of a piece of string, on a half inch remnant of a pencil all the places he believed his creativity was partial to.
“Did these traps work?” the little girl inquired, clearly unsympathetic to the painter’s undertaking.
“No. His creativity had no trouble avoiding all of them,” the Man with the Ladder announced, his tone reflecting a somewhat more sympathetic stance toward the painter.
“What creativity lacks in imagination, it makes up,” the little girl interjected.
“I know, I know,” the Man with the Ladder responded, “the same box of health cereal.” The little girl nodded.
“Frustration drove the painter nearly crazy,” the Man with the Ladder continued.” He discovered that he needed to be creative in order to catch his creativity, but he couldn’t use his creativity because then his creativity would know what he was planning and avoid the trap.
“Catch 22,” the little girl commented.
“Worse. Catch 24,” the Man with the Ladder advised her. “The painter didn’t know which of his other competencies he could trust. He couldn’t tell which were allied with his creativity, and which were his creativity’s enemies and hence, in this enterprise, his allies. He had doubts about imagination and desire, and was suspicious of intuition. Ultimately, he was reduced to using the most impoverished of human resources, cunning, reason and will, which were servile and untrustworthy, but guaranteed, he thought, to be least likely in cahoots with creativity.”
“Did he succeed?” the little girl asked.
“After a few weeks of escalated hunting he was in a frazzle. He had nothing to show for his effort but bilious disappointment, continuous annoyance, and a fat bundle of self contempt. He stopped painting. He used his free time to exercise his obsession with trapping his creativity. It turned out that this obsession was the instrument of his victory. Reason wasn’t enough. Will wasn’t enough. Cunning wasn’t enough. But these plus obsession were plenty.”
“Why was that,” the little girl inquired.
“I’m not sure you really want to know,” the Man with the Ladder said. The little girl looked at him sharply.
“Only obsession is powerful enough to drive common sense completely out the window.”
“One morning, shortly after he had become obsessed with this quixotic pursuit, the painter woke from a quiescent, empty sleep with a idea for a device that he was certain would trap his creativity. The plans came to him in a dream, as fully formed and as well laid out as the plans that come with kits for building model airplanes or doll houses.
“It was a diabolical trap and he immediately set about constructing it. After he had finished putting it together he was certain that it would catch his creativity. It is true that he had been certain that the traps he had set earlier would catch his creativity. But this certainty was different. It had the color and taste of foreknowledge as clear and cold and certain as hindsight, as indubitable and undeniable as…as… as the fact that we to are sitting here talking,” the Man with the Ladder said to the little girl.
“We are not talking,” the little girl reminded him. “You are telling a story and I’m listening.”
“You are a stickler for details,” the Man with the Ladder commented.
“Anyway, he set the trap in his studio where he had constructed it and went upstairs to his bedroom where he secluded himself to wait for his moment of victory. As he sat on the bed, he previewed his victory: an image seeped into his mind and underneath the image, like titles in a foreign movie, his thoughts flashed. On the screen in his head he saw himself pursuing a very amorphous figure that he took to be his creativity. It was fleeing him on foot. For a long time it out-paced him, but suddenly he saw the gap between them close rapidly. Underneath the image, his thoughts ran in bold letters.”
“HOW WILL CREATIVITY REACT TO THIS FINAL VICTORIOUS ASSAULT? IF CREATIVITY TAKES UMBRAGE, FEELS SLIGHTED OR OFFENDED OR HURT, WILL IT RESPOND BY LEAVING ITS MASTER UP A PAINTED CREEK WITHOUT A PAINTED PADDLE?”
“He began to sweat, and the ambiguous figure of creativity that he was pursuing suddenly changed it’s shape and direction and instead of fleeing, turned, and snarling, with bared teeth, began bombarding him with vicious blows of foreboding and fear.
“In the darkness of his bedroom, facing in his anemic imagination his aroused creativity he decided, on the spot, to abandon the attempt to trap it. For the first time he saw clearly that hunting it was a senseless and self destructive enterprise.”
“But at the moment this resolution formed in his mind, he heard the trap go off and a horrendous caterwauling, keening and banging begin from the general direction of the trap.
“He fled his bedroom and rushed down to his studio, taking the stairs recklessly, two at a time, with an abandon he had not exhibited for years, and then only in amorous misadventures.”
“At the moment he pushed open the door and threw on the light of his studio (where he had set the trap) the racket seemed to reach a pitiful climax. Then it ceased instantly and absolutely.”
“Standing in front of the sprung trap he nearly slipped out of his mind. He convinced himself that he was in deep, terminal trouble and started to cry. Distraught, he forced himself to move over to the cage from which was coming only an eerie, unnatural silence. He opened it and peered in.”
“What did he see?” the little girl asked curiously.
“He couldn’t quite make it out. Whatever it was, was pure ugliness; it was shapeless; it looked slimy; and it was drooling. He realized he did not have enough imagination to provide him with a picture of his creativity so that, at that instant, he was not absolutely certain what he had caught. His eyes were smarting from the tears and he blinked, and it seemed that whatever was in the cage was undescribably beautiful, glowing and shimmering. He rubbed his eyes and looked again and the trap was absolutely empty.
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” the little girl complained softly.
“I agree,” the Man with the Ladder said. “But that was the way it was. The painter was completely unnerved by this series of events.”
“What did he do then,” the little girl asked.
“Out of a desperate frustration and confusion he smashed the trap, stamping on it with his foot until it was completely demolished. Then, exhausted, resigning himself to a life devoid of creativity, he turned to go up to his bedroom. As he shut off the light and opened the door to leave, he felt something rush past him into the hall and he heard a cackle, which grew into a laugh, which rushed invisibly up the walls and over the ceiling and cascaded into an explosion of joyous laughter which seemed be joined by laughter from inside of him as from everywhere else in the house.
“He realized that his creativity had used the trap he had constructed to trap him, and that he had been made into the butt of an enormous impractical joke with a sharply pointed moral which he was beginning to grasp. He understood that he had caught it only as he had been caught by it, and had had it, and released it, and never really had it, but had been had, all the time.”
“Then he didn’t kill it,” the girl said relieved.
“No. Not at all. He had barely the wit left to realize that his creativity had used the opportunity to teach him a lesson, and that it had enjoyed the hunting and trapping game immensely, and that its pleasure in embarrassing and frightening him and teaching him a lesson, more than made up for any minor inconvenience he had caused it.
“In the pleasure of sheer relief, the painter affirmed the decision he had made in his moment of clarity to abandon any attempt to force himself on his creativity; he swore he would be satisfied with a good working relationship with that anonymous part of himself that served him so well.”
“His creativity mag…mag…magn, completely forgave him then,” the little girl said.
“Magnanimously,” said the Man with the Ladder.
“I’m glad that there were no concussions,” the little girl said.
“Repercussions,” corrected the storyteller. “Not big ones at least, only…”
“Only what?” the little girl inquired, anxious about a hole in the ending of the story through which heaven knows what would climb.
“Only, every once in a while, not often, but too often for him, the painter would start painting a portrait and it would come out a still life with a monkey and bananas.”
“His creativity never let him forget.”
“You could say that,” The Man with the Ladder said. “You could say that.”
§
Reb Dunzel, who, for most of his life had worked part time as a
cantor in the synagogue on
At first he worked from a bench in the park where, when he did not have a customer, he hung out, kibitzing with his buddies. But as he got more and more customers, his friend, the Man with the Ladder, told him that it was not professional to work so publicly.
“Where should I work?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“An office would be nice,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“I am doing well,” Reb Dunzel said, “but who knows how long it will last. You’re at the mercy of border patrols and elections and …”
“Even at home would be better,” the Man with the Ladder suggested.
Reb Dunzel thought about it. “At home,” he said. “There’s that room,” he began.
“More like a closet,” the Man with the Ladder commented.
“A roomy closet,” Reb Dunzel declared. “I could clean it out and put in a table and a few chairs, maybe the certificate and the degree.”
“What certificate, what degree?” his friend inquired.
“Oh, one of my customers is a printer. He couldn’t pay me in cash but he provided, a genuine Strawman Institute Certificate of Merit in Mantraology. I’m working toward a Ph.D. Three more chants and I get my doctorate of Mantology and Chants.”
The two friends wandered over to Reb Dunzel’s house and opened the closet. It was filled with boxes. “Give me a hand,” Reb Dunzel asked his friend. “We can move this stuff out and fix it up really nicely. A certificate on the wall and I have an office.”
“Where did you get all of the stuff?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Flotsam and jetsam of former lives,” Reb Dunzel replied. When the closet was empty they stood in the center and looked around.”It’s a bit on the cramped side,” the Man with the Ladder stated, jostling Reb Dunzel.
“Big enough for a small table, two chairs, a client and a chant,” Reb Dunzel estimated.
“The walls are dirty and streaked,” the Man with the Ladder observed. “You have to paint them.”
“I think it has character,” Reb Dunzel said, “unpainted.”
“Blotched, dirty walls do not generate confidence,” the Man with the Ladder announced. “Freshly painted walls would generate professional atmosphere—confidence,” the Man with the Ladder explained. “A paint job and a certificate and you can double your prices. Throw in a mantra and I will help you paint it,” he volunteered.
“Would you,” Reb Dunzel replied, “that would be wonderful.”
“What color would be best?” the Man with the Ladder mused. “We could buy a gallon. A gallon would certainly cover everything, walls, ceiling, even the floor.”
“I can’t afford a gallon of new paint,” Reb Dunzel explained, “a cash flow problem.” He thought for a moment. “I’ve accumulated a few cans of paint left over from painting jobs I’ve done over the years. We could mix those together and whatever color came out would be the color of the mantra room. It’s an appropriate way of choosing a paint for a mantra room, I think—leave it to spirit and chance.”
His friend started to voice reservations but the lack of cash convinced him. “It sounds OK to me. Lets do it.”
In the corner of Reb Dunzel’s basement a pyramid of old cans of paint rose to the ceiling. “I’m sure some of these have not completely dried out and one of them holds enough to do the closet,” Reb Dunzel said, shaking one of them. He grabbed two screwdrivers off of a shelf and handed one to the Man with the Ladder.
After the eighteenth can Reb Dunzel hit paydirt. “I’ve found one not completely dried out,” he said after he pried off the top of can that was covered with splotches of yellow paint. He set it aside. “This will be the mantra room paint,” he said peering inside. “But there’s not enough to cover the whole closet,” he announced, “keep looking.”
“Live paint,” his friend said after another dozen cans had been opened and poked at.
“What color is it?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“I’m not sure,” his friend replied. “Pink, I think.”
“It doesn’t look pink,” Reb Dunzel said, peering in. “Stir it.”
“Pinkish,” his friend amended his judgment. “Warm,” he suggested after a little more stirring.
“Pour it in,” Reb Dunzel said, holding out the can of mantra room paint. The paint in the can Reb Dunzel was holding turned a murky brown.
“I guess it wasn’t pink,” his friend acknowledged “Madder, it looks like madder.”
“What is madder?” Reb Dunzel wanted to know.
“A color, very expensive, very rare, so we paint the room madder,” the Man with the Ladder said decisively.
“It’s still not enough for the closet,” his friend announced disappointedly, peering into the can, “keep looking.” They kept on opening cans and pouring the contents of those that hadn’t dried up into the can of mantra room paint.
“We’ve opened all the cans of old paint,” the Man with the Ladder announced finally. Reb Dunzel peered into the can of paintable paint. “It’s three quarters full,” he observed. “Enough to paint the mantra room.”
“It’s not madder any more,” his friend noted peering into the can “it’s … ”
“It’s a dark, murky, blackish, brown. Just right for chants,” Reb Dunzel said enthusiastically, “should we start painting.”
“I need a rest,” the Man with the Ladder said, “Let me go home and change before we start painting. These are my best work clothes and I don’t want to get paint on them, not even madder. I’m not a careful painter,” he confessed. “See you in a little while,” he said and took off.
II
When he returned, outfitted in a tee shirt and shorts, they began painting the room. They rolled up and rolled down and sideways and sideways again through the afternoon into the evening.
“It’s larger than it looks,” the Man with the Ladder said. “We’ve run out of paint.”
“No wonder,” Reb Dunzel said. “You got as much on you as the walls.”
“I’m more a wall paper person,” his friend announced. His tee shirt was covered with dark, blackish brown splotches.
“Well, we got three walls done,” Reb Dunzel said, scrutinizing their work. “Not bad.”
“What do we do now?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“I think we going to have to buy more paint,” Reb Dunzel conceded, “only there are going to be three walls in one color and a third … ”
“Very modern,” the Man with the Ladder observed. “Very post modern modern.”
“Maybe we can match the color,” Reb Dunzel thought out loud. He looked at his friends shirt. “Take off your shirt.”
“I’ll be cold.”
“I’ll give you a sweater.”
“I’ll be hot.”
“It’s a short trip to the hardware store. When we match the paint using these splotches on your shirt you can put it back on again.”
The Man with the Ladder parted with his shirt reluctantly. “Don’t get it dirty,” he cautioned, “I mean any dirtier than it is already.”
“Where should we look for paint?” Reb Dunzel asked. “We need something really cheap. “I have about three dollars and fifty cents until tomorrow.”
“There a little hardware store, I know,” the Man with the Ladder said. “It’s not a hardware store exactly. It’s a one-of-everything-store. They sell odd and ends, used hinges, repossessed screws and nails, shirts and things, one of everything. I’m sure they have paint. It should be cheap. You might even be able to trade one of your mantras for the paint. They owner is Chinese, although his English is perfect and, since he owns a business, he may not need a mantra.”
Although the Man with the Ladder swore he knew exactly where it was, they wandered around for a long time before they stumbled on the little one-of-everything store.
When they entered the store, the owner was giving advice to a customer in precise engineering English, but when the customer left he greeted Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder in an imitation Charlie Chan accent.
“What can honorable servant do for you?” he asked.
“Paint,” Reb Dunzel said. “Can you match this color?” He held out the Man with the Ladder’s shirt.
The owner held the shirt at arms length. “How many gallons you want?” he asked.
“Not gallons,” Reb Dunzel replied.
“Half gallon?” the owner asked.
“More like a pint,” Reb Dunzel said. “About three dollars and fifty cents worth, max.”
“I see,” the owner said. “For three fifty, can of spray paint, max” he announced and pointed to a box in the corner.
Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder made their way to the box. “Here?” Reb Dunzel asked, pointing to a box overflowing with gears and bags filled with nails and screws.
“Somewhere,” the owner replied, busying himself dusting the counter.
Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder rummaged around noisily in the box. “I’ve got something,” the Man with the Ladder announced, holding up a spray can of paint. “Does it match?” Reb Dunzel asked, holding out the shirt.
“I can’t tell,” the Man with the Ladder said exasperatingly, “there’s no top. It says, ‘Picasso Paint’.”
“Is that the brand or the color?” Reb Dunzel inquired. “I never heard of a color called Picasso.”
“I think its shade of blue,” the Man with the Ladder offered. “It might match.”
“How much is it?” Reb Dunzel asked.
His friend held out the can of paint. “There doesn’t seem to be a price on it.” It was covered with grime and paint drippings.
“It will have to do,” Reb Dunzel said. They went to the counter. “How much is it?” he asked.
“Picasso Paint,” the owner said. “You sure you want it?”
Reb Dunzel gripped the can tightly. “It will do,” he said.
“For that can,
Reb Dunzel handed over the cash and the owner put the money on the register without counting it. He slipped the can into a bag and faced them again. “You know how to paint?” he asked.
“Move your anatomy out of the way,” Reb Dunzel said smugly, “then hold the button down. What’s to know how to spray paint?” he muttered to his friend as they walked out of the store and headed home.
III
“It’s getting late,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I’m not sure we can finish the job tonight,” as he pushed the door to the closet open.
“We can start,” Reb Dunzel said. “Whatever we don’t finish today we can complete tomorrow.” He gave the Man with the Ladder back his tee shirt and took the can of spray paint out of the bag. “Shake it,” his friend admonished as Reb Dunzel pointed the the can towards the top of the wall to begin spraying.
Reb Dunzel shook the can vigorously. He stuck his arm out rigidly, pulled his face a good distance away and pushed the button. There was a whoosing sound but no paint emerged.
“Let me try “ his friend suggested. Reb Dunzel gave him the can. the Man with the Ladder shook it wildly. “Now I think it will work.” He pressed the button on the top of the can.
“The wall,” Reb Dunzel yelled, “on the wall.” A mist came out of the nozzle and covered the Man with the Ladder‘s shirt.
“Well,” he said, handing the can back to his friend. “Well have a sample to match if we need more. The front of his shirt was covered with a dark blotch of brownish color.
Reb Dunzel began spraying the wall. The paint sputtered out of the can wildly. After he had deposited a layer of paint on the wall in two broad swoops he stopped.
“It’s a muddy color,” he announced. “It looks just like mud, in fact. It doesn’t match the other paint at all.”
They examined the wall. “It looks like the bottom of a river bed,” the Man with the Ladder announced. The paint had come out lumpy as if bits of pigment has clumped and coagulated. “Shake it some more, maybe the color sank to the bottom.” They took turns shaking the can. the Man with the Ladder shook sideways, Reb Dunzel shook up and down. “That should do it,” Reb Dunzel announced, shifting the can to painting position. He began spraying again.
“I can’t see any difference,” the Man with the Ladder announced peering at the wall.
“The lumps are more evenly distributed,” his friend commented after he examined the most recent swath of brown paint. “I don’t think it will pay to shake any more.” His voice was coated with disappointment. “Maybe we should take the can back and complain,” he said.
“I don’t think complaining will do any good,” his friend said. “Let’s just buy another can somewhere else tomorrow.”
Reb Dunzel surveyed the half covered wall. “We’ll probably have to scrape the wall down tomorrow,” he said, pointing to the lumps of brown pigment on the half of the wall they had covered with the muddy colored paint. “It’s unacceptable as the wall of a mantra room,” he commented.
“Perhaps you could call it a chant space,” his friend muttered, “authentic, primordial and cosmic.” His friend looked at him sharply. “OK, we can scrape tomorrow and then paint again,” the Man with the Ladder conceded. “I’ve got to get home,” he said. “I have just made another set of work clothes out of street clothes,” he sighed.
Reb Dunzel tossed him the can of paint. “Throw this away in the trash,” he said disgustedly.
“There’s still half a can left,” the Man with the Ladder announced.
“It’s worthless,” Reb Dunzel muttered. “Tomorrow we can start again with a new can of paint and finish the wall.” He stood staring at the wall as his friend left.
IV
“You’re going to ruin a very nice tee shirt,” Reb Dunzel said, answering his friends ring the next morning. The Man with the Ladder was wearing a bright white tee shirt with a very abstract portrait of a woman’s face on the front curling under his arms and nearly covering the back.
“It’s very strange,” his friend replied. “I wanted to ask you about it.” They headed for the closet they had painted the day before. “This morning, when I got up …” He did not finish the sentence. Reb Dunzel opened the door of the closet and screamed.
“What is it?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Look for yourself,” Reb Dunzel said.
“On the wall they had spray painted was the headless figure of a woman. She was oddly angular and abstract. They stared at it. “There’s the place your teeshirt goes,” Reb Dunzel pointed out. “Take it off.” When his friend handed him the shirt he held it up. The head fit exactly.
“What is it?” the Man with the Ladder wanted to know.
“It’s a portrait of a woman,” Reb Dunzel said.
“No woman I’ve ever seen,” the Man with the Ladder commented.
“A painting of a woman,” Reb Dunzel mumbled. “If I did not know better I would say it was a Picasso painting.”
“It certainly gives the room class,” his friend observed. “But the bottom half of her is missing.” They both stood speechless for a moment then bolted for the door.
“Perhaps we can find the can,” Reb Dunzel said, rushing past his friend. “The painting would be very valuable,” he added, “completed. We could cut the wall down and sell it. It would be worth a lot of chants. What did you do with the can?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“I tossed it in the garbage,” he repleid.
“It was half filled and very valuable,” Reb Dunzel muttered.
“You told me to toss it away and I tossed it away, don’t blame me for it.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Reb Dunzel conceded. “I just hope it is still in the garbage can.”
They reached dented garbage can and took off the lid. “Everything is here. I threw out a lot of junk yesterday and that’s still here but … ”
“No can of paint,” the Man with the Ladder observed.
“Maybe one of the kids in the neighborhood picked it up. They are always rummaging around in the trash looking for cans of paint to spray graffiti on walls,” he commented. “Perhaps….” They started down the street examining the walls and fences of the houses. “Look.” The Man with the Ladder pointed at a fence. There was a tag, the signature of the artist. The cursive path was filled in with parts of their Picasso’s woman’s body.
“There’s another,” Reb Dunzel pointed out. The same signature was painted on a garbage can with additional parts of the woman filling the surface of the letters. They followed the path of graffiti until the last signature faded out in a mist of toes on the side of an abandoned building.
“There goes Picasso,” Reb Dunzel lamented.
They trudged home like disappointed buyers at an art auction. The wall of the mantra room with the half of a Picasso portrait of a woman glowed as they opened the door. “It is beautiful,” Reb Dunzel said, “a real Picasso. I took an art class once,” he added, “it looks like a very early Picasso. When he was just starting to be Picasso.”
The Man with the Ladder shook his head. “What can we do now with a faceless half a Picasso?” the Man with the Ladder asked, looking at his tee shirt taped to the wall.
“Well,” said Reb Dunzel, “if we glue your tee shirt to the wall, we have all of a half of a Picasso portrait of a woman.” He sat silent for a moment. “Maybe the one-of-a-kind store has another can of Picasso paint?”
Without saying another word the two friends rushed out the door and headed to the one-of-a-kind store.
V
“I don’t remember seeing another can of spray paint in that box,” Reb Dunzel said as they hurried to the store.
“Neither do I,” the Man with the Ladder added. “But we stopped looking as soon as we found the can. Maybe there’s another one near the bottom of the box.”
“Don’t act excited when we get to the store,” Reb Dunzel said, “if the owner sees we are really interested he will charge double for the paint. Just act natural,” he advised.
When they walked through the door of the small store the owner had abandoned the Charlie Chan accent and greeted them in a folksy Midwestern drawl. Reb Dunzel looked around casually. The box from which they had extracted the can of Picasso paint was missing. He panicked. “Where’s the box?” he blurted out.
“We took an inventory yesterday, friends. Would you like some cider?” Take a load off, sit down.” the Man with the Ladder moved towards the barrel to which the owner pointed but Reb Dunzel grabbed his shirt and held him back. “Picasso paint,” he blurted out.
“Picasso paint,” the owner nodded. “I gather since you are back, your paint job must have turned out well,” he added. “You need some more to complete the job because you weren’t careful. Well,” he drawled … ”
In his mind, Reb Dunzel saw the price jumping up to an astronomical level. “Not quite he said, “my wife … ”
“Your wife fell in love with the colors,” he said. “Picasso,” he added, “I can understand. I’m not sure we have any more left though,” he said as he ducked down and rummaged around on a shelf behind the counter. “Greyish pink, bluish, blood red, madder,” he enumerated out loud. “You’re sure you don’t want a madder. Very lovely. Expensive, but lovely.” He was silent for a moment. His body disappeared from their view and his voice seemed like it was coming from a distance. “Picasso paint,” he said his voice coming to them as whisper. “One can left,” he said. “No more when that’s gone. The company went out of business.” He extracted himself from the shelf and plunked the can down on the shelf. “Last can,” he repeated.
Reb Dunzel prepared himself to be gouged.
“Since you are repeat customers,” the owner said, staring at them
as he dusted himself off, “and seeing as though we don’t have anymore, it will
be
Reb Dunzel counted out money deliberately and placed it in the owners outstretched hand. “ You sure you guys know how to use this Picasso spray paint?” he said, “sometimes it’s tricky.”
Reb Dunzel grabbed the can. “No bag,” he said quickly. When he had it firmly in his hands he turned to the owner. “I think my friend here might need a quick review of painting technique,” he said, pointing to the Man with the Ladder. “Are there special instructions,” he asked, “I mean for this paint?”
“It’s the last can of this paint,” the owner repeated quite slowly. He picked up a corn cob pipe that was laying on the counter and shoved it in his mouth. “There may be special instructions. You should read the label on the can carefully. Usually though, if there’s a lid, take it off, shake the can, take your anatomy out of the way and push the button down carefully. Now that you’re regular customers,” he said, “don’t keep yourself strangers.” He waved goodby to them as they left.
Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder hurried to the little office to begin the completion of their Picasso.
“I’m sure it will be very valuable,” the Man with the Ladder said, “when we finish it. I wish we had painted a fence, or a box. We are going to have to cut this wall completely down, I mean if we want to sell it,” he added.
“Lets finish it before we think about making a killing in the art market,” Reb Dunzel grunted, putting the can down on the table and surveying the piece of the picture that was on the wall.
“Its beautiful,” the Man with the Ladder said in a hushed tone. “You hardly notice the tee shirt.” Reb Dunzel had replaced the tape that held the tee shirt to the wall with tacks.
Reb Dunzel prepared to begin spraying. “Maybe you should read the instructions, if there are any,” the Man with the Ladder suggested.
Reb Dunzel held his face close to the can. “If there is a lid, remove it,” the instructions on the can began. “The special pigment in this paint separates easly from the vehicle. Shake vigorously. It is essential when…. I can’t read anymore,”Reb Dunzel announced. “The rest of the instructions are covered by dried paint.”
“I hope they didn’t say anything important,” the Man with the Ladder added as his friend began carefully extend the boundary of the earlier painting.
VI
“Let me spray for a while,” the Man with the Ladder asked when Reb Dunzel had nearly covered the bottom half the wall. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a great painter.” The Man with the Ladder finished the wall, running the last strip half on the wall and half on the floor. “Done,” he announced.
“The bottom half of a Picasso finished,” Reb Dunzel said, “and there’s still half a can of paint left to touch up any baldspots.” From the top half of the wall a curved and angular woman regarded them intently.
The bottom half of the wall was covered in a uniformly mucky brown color. “It looks a little darker than yesterday,” Reb Dunzel commented.
“How can you tell?” the Man with the Ladder asked. “It looks the same to me. Maybe a little darker mud, but mud,” he said. “Maybe the paint from this can will dry this way and it will take us three days to scrape the wall down.”
“It’s just the way it looked before the Picasso hatched,” his friend said. “Tomorrow the painting will be cooked and we can call in an appraiser. How much do you think genuine Picassos are going for?”
“I haven’t got any idea,” Reb Dunzel said. “The tee shirt may lower the price.”
“It’s a collage,” the Man with the Ladder said suddenly. “Picasso did collages,” he announced. “The price of collages can’t be much less than the price of straight paintings on canvas. Lets go and get some croissants and coffee and let the paint age. We’ll come back tomorrow and see what the whole painting looks like.” Reb Dunzel took one last look at the painting before he gently closed the door. “Do you think it will have a signature?” he asked.
“Indubitably,” the Man with the Ladder said. “His, not ours. Picasso.”
VII
The next morning, the Man with the Ladder rang the bell of Reb
Dunzel’s house at
“What are you doing here so early?” Reb Dunzel asked, standing before his friend who was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shaking with excitement.
“I couldn’t wait,” the Man with the Ladder explained. “The creative process got my juices flowing. I couldn’t wait to see how it came out.”
They walked in silence to the chant room. “You open it,” Reb Dunzel said. “I couldn’t bear seeing mud.” The Man with the Ladder pushed the door open and turned on the light. “No mud,” he said tentatively, “but … ”
“But what?” his friend yelled pushing his way into the room. “It’s Picasso, but it’s different,” he announced. The bottom section of the painting that they had completed the day before was the bottom half of a portrait of a woman. “It’s definitely a woman,” the Man with the Ladder announced, “and its definitely a Picasso, but …,”
“But an entirely different woman in a different Picasso style,” his friend said. It was clear that the painting before them spanned the career of Picasso. The upper half was in his early style.
“The bottom half is a late style Picasso,” the Man with the Ladder announced. “I got a book out of the library,” he informed his friend. “Picasso alright, but much later than the top part, even if you make allowances for the tee shirt.”
They stood staring at the painting. The upper torso of the woman was blocked out in almost a single shade of flesh color. The body, consisted of angular arms at sharp angles. The breasts were curved lines that marked boundaries between planes of flesh. The bottom part of the portrait was a colorful sea of lines broken into triangles. The muddy color that had come out of the can had changed into bright green and red and yellow colors. The hands that extended down from the first half of the painting into the second changed to rounded green elongated knobs.
“Picasso for sure,” the Man with the Ladder announced. “Two Picassos in fact. I don’t think two Picassos on a single canvas will be worth much. People prefer their Picasso straight.” He collapsed on the chair.
“We still have half a can of paint left,” Reb Dunzel announced suddenly. “Supose we repaint the top half of the portrait. You can have your tee shirt back and we can get a portrait of a woman in single Picasso style.” He retrieved the can from the basement where he had put it and moved to the wall to begin spraying.
“Wait.” the Man with the Ladder yelled suddenly. “We should try to read the instructions again. Maybe we can get rid of the dried paint and see if there are any special, hidden instructions.”
“A good idea,” Reb Dunzel said. They found a can of paint remover in the basement and began the delicate processes of removing the dried paint that obscured most of the label.
“Can you make out what it says?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Barely,” his friend said. He began reading. “Used exactly according to instructions Picasso paint is guaranteed to produce a genuine, beautiful Picasso.”
“That’s encouraging,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“Take off the top of the can and hold your finger lightly on the button,” the instructions continued.
“Makes sense to me,” Reb Dunzel commented. He read on. “Remove your face and any other part of your anatomy from in front of the can, push the button down and begin spraying.”
“That’s exactly what we did,” the Man with the Ladder complained.
“There’s a little more,” his friend said. “Sprayed from left to right this can will produce one genuine Picasso portrait of a woman in Picasso’s early style. Sprayed right to left it will produce one genuine Picasso portrait of a woman in Picasso’s late style.”
“There’s the answer,” Reb Dunzel said. “We must have sprayed left to right the first time and right to left the second. If the top part is early and the bottom late the solution is simple. We’ll redo the top spraying, spraying right to left. We’ll get the top half of the portrait of the woman to match the late style on the bottom.” He jumped up. “I’ll get your tee shirt off of the top before we repaint it.” He struggled scraping with a variety of knives trying not to gouge the wall before he gave up. “It’s welded to the wall. We’ll have to spray over it. A collage,” he declared.
“There are a couple of more lines of instructions,” his friend said, “but they are still covered by paint. Don’t you think …?”
“I think we’ve gotten to the instructions relevant to the core of our problem,” Reb Dunzel said jumping up. “I’ll take the label off of the can and you can get the paint off of the last line while I redo the masterpiece. They are probably instructions for selling the painting,” he said. He got a razorblade and removed the label. “You get rid of the last bit of paint on the instructions while I make our fortune.” He began spraying moving carefully from right edge to the left edge.
“I can make it out,” the Man with the Ladder announced as Reb Dunzel finished overlapping a swath of mud over the edge of the late Picasso. “It says… “ He pushed his face very close to the label on the can. “This paint is made for painting on bare walls. Painting over any existing painting, whatever the painter or whatever the style, will give absolutely unpredictable results and should only be attempted by Picasso himself.”
“What do you think that means?” Reb Dunzel said exhausted from the effort of completing the Picasso and confused by what the Man with the Ladder had read.
“I’m not sure exactly but I think it means we if you paint over Picasso with Picasso you might not get a Picasso at all.”
“Definitely not true,” Reb Dunzel said. “It felt like I was painting Picasso. It’s the same mud as far as I can see.”
“I hope so,” the Man with the Ladder said, his voice communicating his uncertainty. “I guess we’ll see tomorrow,” he added as his friend walked him to the door.
VIII
Reb Dunzel was waiting anxiously outside the door of his house when the Man with the Ladder finally showed up.
“How come yesterday you came early and today when we are about to become rich with a whole Picasso portrait of a woman you come late?” Reb Dunzel asked grouchily.
“I was so excited I couldn’t sleep,” the Man with the Ladder answered sheepishly. “I spent the night reading a book on Picasso. The first portrait we sprayed was like the ones he painted in 1906 or so, and I’ve pinned the second one down to a definite fifty year stretch later.” He followed Reb Dunzel into the house.
“Don’t count your periods until its sold,” Reb Dunzel said. “I worry about the tee shirt. Do you think they will buy the idea it is a collage?”
“Picasso is dead,” his friend said, “the collage speaks for itself. The question is how much will they buy it for.”
“You first,” Reb Dunzel said pushing his friend towards the room.
“I looked first yesterday and the excitement nearly gave me a heart attack. If there’s something wrong you’ll blame me because I looked first,” the Man with the Ladder complained.
“I won’t blame you,” Reb Dunzel assured him as he pushed him towards the door. “Just open it and look. If you don’t scream I’ll assume …”
The Man with the Ladder opened the door and screamed.
Reb Dunzel rushed past him almost knocking him down. He stared at the wall. “It’s, it’s …”
“Its a portrait of a woman,” the Man with the Ladder said, breaking the silence. “But …”
“It’s a portrait of a woman,” Reb Dunzel repeated, “but the top is different. It’s not the same woman and all of the colors are brown.”
“Its very realistic. The nose is a nose, the eyes are eyes. You can tell she’s a little overweight.”
“It’s a Rembrandt. The top of the Picasso portrait is a Rembrandt,” Reb Dunzel shrieked.
“Don’t look at me,” the Man with the Ladder protested. “I only shook the can.”
“You painted it,” Reb Dunzel contended.
“I only finished it, the very bottom of the top” his friend asserted. “You did most of the spraying. If its anyone’s fault …”
“It’s no ones fault,” Reb Dunzel conceded. “What could have gone wrong? Why would a can of Picasso paint produce Rembrandt?”
The Man with the Ladder sank into the chair. “The last line of the instructions,” he muttered. “If you paint over another painting the results are very uncertain.”
“The results are not uncertain at all,” Reb Dunzel insisted, “they’re a damn Rembrandt.”
“It’s beautiful,” the Man with the Ladder whispered staring at the painting. “A little weird I admit, but beautiful.”
“No one will buy it,” Reb Dunzel said, “She’s a freak,” he complained. “It requires too much imagination to grasp.”
“If you close one eye … ” the Man with the Ladder began, but stopped after Reb Dunzel glared at him. He was silent for a moment then mumbled, “women are complex. I know a woman who more or less looks like that only she is split side by side not up and down. What do we do now?”the Man with the Ladder asked, not really expecting an answer.
“Another trip back to the one-of-everything store,” Reb Dunzel suggested. “Maybe there’s …”
“What’s the use?” the Man with the Ladder whined. “We bought the last can of Picasso paint and I’m sure there’s no Rembrandt paint. Why bother going back?”
“I don’t know,” Reb Dunzel said, “Maybe we can touch it up enough so that you won’t notice …” He stopped. “Who knows,” he yelled at his depressed companion. “Do you have a better idea?”
When the Man with the Ladder confessed he was out of ideas they set out for the store. “We should have some story,” the Man with the Ladder suggested.
“We do have a story,” Reb Dunzel answered.
“I mean a plausible story, a story that doesn’t make us seem like dolts who don’t know how to use a can of Picasso spray paint at least. How about we painted wet over wet, sprayed over a wall that was not quite dry and messed it up completely and …. OK,” he conceded, “it’s not a good story but … ”
Reb Dunzel anticipated the owner of the one of a kind store mocking them. “You fellows need to take a course in holding a can straight and pushing down a nozzle,” he said imitating the midwestern drawl of the owner of the one of a kind store.
As they pushed the door of the store open the owner greeted them. “Again back,” he said, reverting to his Charlie Chan accent. “Screw up Picasso, don’t follow instructions. Sorry, no more Picasso paint, gone,” he said, “dead,” He turned away from them. “Not simple as appears,” he said rubbing their silence in their faces.
“We need to touch it up a bit,” Reb Dunzel conceded.
“You bring color swatch?” the owner asked in his sing song accent.
“No,” Reb Dunzel said dejectedly. “A color swatch wouldn’t help, I’m afraid.”
“Cover it up only solution,” the owner said. “No more Picasso paint. Have a touch up white,” he added. “Cover anything, made by Japanese factory located in Singapore or Singapore factory located in Hong Kong,” he corrected himself, “or …”
Reb Dunzel interrupted him. “Doesn’t matter where the paint was made,” he said abruptly.
“Not to you, but different,” the owner insisted. “One has detailed instructions. The other, on your own. Not suitable for … for amateurs,” he commented caustically.
Reb Dunzel let the insult slide past him. “How does it work.”
“Not spray paint,” the owner said. “Touch up. Easy. Open the can, pour into tray, roll roller then cover completely and … ” he said and paused. Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder waited or him to finish the sentence but the small Chinese man said nothing more.
“And,” Reb Dunzel asked.
“And nothing. Touched up. Covers your mistake.”
“Obliteration,” Reb Dunzel said. “Don’t you have anything less drastic, something for just touching up?” he asked.
“Something more effective for correcting mistakes,” the Man with the Ladder added.
“Scraping more effective for mistake. Wallpaper more effective for mistake. This genuine touch up paint. A new start. I give it you cheap. Americans prefer new start. One problem though” he said, dropping the Charlie Chan accent and enunciating his words clearly. “There’s one problem. This is the last coat of paint that you can put on the wall. No other paint will stick to it. When its painted the fat lady sings. Done.”
IX
Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder walked home deep in thought hardly talking at all. “I’m not sure,” Reb Dunzel finally said.
“I’m not sure either,” the Man with the Ladder added.
“About what?” his friend asked.
“About what you are not sure about,” he replied, “touching up. It will be a drastic, final step.”
“Can you think of anything else?” Reb Dunzel asked. “I can’t.”
“Neither can I,” the Man with the Ladder admitted. “But it seems to me that touching up is finishing off.” They made their way into the house and to the mantra closet without saying a word.
“What do you think,” Reb Dunzel said.
“If you squint,” the Man with the Ladder began.
His friend glared at him. “You can’t make up mantras squinting.”
“Each one is beautiful,” the Man with the Ladder said, blinking at the double portrait, “Rembrandt, Picasso.”
“But the top half of one and the bottom half of the other,” his friend commented.
“I am partial to the Picasso,” the Man with the Ladder stated.
“So am I,” Reb Dunzel added. “She was our first love. But the Rembrandt is vivid too. It’s a mantra room,” he said trying to catch hold of some solid place from which to make a decision. “I can’t make up mantras here. It would drive the clients crazy even if I could. There’s no hope for it. We have to paint them over.” He looked to his friend for support.
“Maybe you would get used to it,” the Man with the Ladder suggested, turning to his friend. Tears were streaming down Reb Dunzel’s face.
“Not a chance,” his friend sniffled, staring at the double portrait again. The top half of the woman carried him into the 17th century. The woman was tidy but a bit on the unwashed side and her sensuality was evenly illuminated. The bottom half, the Picasso half, pulled him close to a wildly 20th century female, whose sensuality was mimicked by the paint on the canvas, erotic, but partial.
“I guess there’s no choice but to touch up then,” the Man with the Ladder said as the tears welled up and he began to cry too. He got a screwdriver out and opened the can of touch up paint. “It’s thick,” he observed, “very thick.”
“It’s a thick, opaque white,” Reb Dunzel said tugging at the stick he had dipped into the can to stir the paint.
“If we put that on, they are done for,” Reb Dunzel said, pouring some paint into the tray. As the paint swirled into the tray, curling, tumbling swirls of different colors appeared. “We didn’t mix it well enough,” the Man with the Ladder declared. “Pour it back,” his friend said. “We’ll stir some more.” They took turns moving the mixing stick around in the can. “I’m tired,” the Man with the Ladder announced.
“Me too,” Reb Dunzel added. “I haven’t seen any swirls for a while. I think it’s done,” he said as poured some paint into the tray. Swirls coursed through the paint in the tray. He put down the can and stared at the paint in the tray and the swirls diffused and settled into a multicolored taffy. He looked at his friend. “Candy cane off white,” he muttered and rolled the roller into the tray to coat it.
His friend looked at the roller as Reb Dunzel lifted it from the tray. “Maybe we should read the instructions he said. He picked up the can and searched for instructions. “Touch up paint,” appeared in blurred letters through his tears. In a tiny box labeled instructions was a single line. “To touch up, pour into a tray, stir viciously, roll or finger paint to cover. Good luck.” The paint seemed to make a sizzling noise as it touched the Rembrandt. A fine mist seemed to rise off of the surface of the painting. “I’m not sure it wants to be touched up,” the Man with the Ladder commented.
“No swirls, at least,” Reb Dunzel noted. He stared at the paint in the tray. “How come there are swirls in the paint in the tray and none in the paint on the wall?” His friend shrugged.
“It’s heavy,” Reb Dunzel said after he had covered a third of the Rembrandt. He stood back. “It completely covers what’s underneath. It touches up by obscuring completely. You paint for a while,” he said to his friend holding out the roller.
The Man with the Ladder took the roller tentatively. “You can’t blame me for whatever happens, you started it,” he said preemptively, as he laid the next stroke covering the torso of the woman in a thick layer of paste like paint. He spun the roller over the beginning of the Picasso. He put down the roller and wiped his eyes then picked it up again and began covering what was left of the woman.
Reb Dunzel watched for a while. “I think you missed a spot there,” he said, pointing to where the woman’s arm had been in the Rembrandt half of the painting.
“It looks OK to me,” the Man with the Ladder said, squinting at the white surface. Reb Dunzel took the roller. “Here it looks a little thin,” he said. The swath he laid down seemed to add a quarter of an inch to the surface of the painting. A swirl of pink quickly sank into the depth of the portrait.
“Did you see that, a swirl.”
His friend examined the paint. “I don’t see anything,” he said.
“It disappeared,” Reb Dunzel asserted. “But now it looks a lot thicker than the rest of what you laid down,” the Man with the Ladder pointed out. Reb Dunzel loaded the roller and began rolling over the bulging edge of the swath he had just laid down. A ridge rippled over the surface of the painting and each pass of the roller added a distinct layer to what seemed like a wall of paint.
“I think you better stop,” the Man with the Ladder suggested, “otherwise it will be to heavy for the wall.” He stood back and looked at the painting. “Except there, there’s a little thinner than anywhere.” He indicated with a finger the spot he meant.
“I don’t see anything,” Reb Dunzel said.
“It’s where the woman’s leg used to be in the Picasso. “A line, the leg, a fleshy curve.” The image stood out clearly in his mind.
Reb Dunzel rolled over the spot. “Better,” his friend added “but now the ridge is too severe.” Reb Dunzel polished the spot with the roller.
They took turns covering and touching up the portrait of the woman until Reb Dunzel announced “I’m tuckered out,” and laid the roller down in the tray.
“I’m tired too,” his friend announced.
“No wonder we’re tired. We used up all of the paint,” Reb Dunzel pointed out as they stood looking at the wall. “It was a gallon.”
“We covered half the wall yesterday with a can of spay paint, and today it takes a gallon to touch up,” his friend remarked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“None of this makes any sense,” Reb Dunzel said. “But it’s touch up paint. A little doesn’t seem to go very much of the way at all.”
“I guess we are going to have to wait until it dries to see how it touched up the painting,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“I think we can get a good idea of what its going to look like when it dries,” Reb Dunzel countered. “Touch up paint means correction by annihilation. Tomorrow we can redo the other three walls in a regular white,” he said as they left the mantra room.
“I guess so,” his friend acknowledged. “With a certificate and a diploma it will look like a doctors office, very professional,” he said sadly. The white wall seemed to highlight the remembered colors of the Picasso and the volume of the Rembrandt.
X
Reb Dunzel’s face wore an emotionless mask when they two friends met the next morning.
“You’ve answered the question I was going to ask,” his friend replied, looking at the caricature of resignation in front of him.
“I haven’t looked at it, if that is what you were going to ask,” Reb Dunzel said. “I look this way because I was thinking about how it was going to look.”
“Think about it as a chance for a new start,” the Man with the Ladder said, trying to cheer him up. “We probably couldn’t have sold the wall as a genuine Picasso and imitation Picassos are a dime a dozen. I have ten dollars I can lend you,” he continued, “and we can buy a gallon of white paint or some other color and redo the other three walls. It will be the last painting we will have to do and you can start to use the room professionally when it dries. You can pump out chants and mantras in profusion in that room.” He tried to sound encouraging.
His words left Reb Dunzel unmoved. “Last night I dreamed about the models, both of them.” He blushed. “Art is so fleeting,” he complained.
“Ephemeral,” the Man with the Ladder added.
“I was thinking, maybe I could buy a Picasso,” Reb Dunzel said wistfully.
“Expensive,” the Man with the Ladder added, “perhaps a poster. If you sold a lot of mantras and some chants, maybe a reproduction. Perhaps one of your customers could …”
“What’s done is done,” Reb Dunzel stated suddenly in a resigned voice. “Lets go see if the paint leveled out and what kind of white it finally leveled out to be.”
“I was thinking,” his friend said. “Why don’t we get some coffee and croissants before we, before we …. I really need some nourishment.”
“How about if we bring breakfast home,” his friend suggested “and face the bitter blankness over hot and sweet.”
They walked as slowly as they could to the pastry shop and carried their breakfast home in a bag at a funereal pace. The walked slowly through the house to the mantra room. “Wait,” Reb Dunzel said reluctantly, holding the bag with the coffee and croissants out in front of him defensively. “I think …” but the Man with the Ladder had already opened the door. He screamed and grabbed the doorway inadvertently blocking Reb Dunzel vision.
“What is it,” Reb Dunzel asked frantically trying to peer around his friend’s rigid body. He squeezed his way between an elbow and a knee and looked at the wall. “What, who is it?” he asked again this time in a reverent voice. Before him on unbrown, unwhite wall of the mantra room was a painting, a portrait of a woman.
The Man with the Ladder barked out. “It’s a Picasso but painted by Rembrandt.”
“Or a Rembrandt painted by Picasso,” his friend suggested.
“It’s all of the women together, I can tell,” the Man with the Ladder asserted. His tee shirt had been cemented seamlessly to the wall and become part of the texture of the woman’s features. The face was recognizable as a Rembrandt face but the color and line were Picasso. The body was Picasso but clearly done by a classical hand. The Rembrandt torso rested firmly on Picasso like chiaroscuro legs and the floor that supported her was a floor that bespoke collaboration. She was a single figure, in a single transcendent style.
“She’s more beautiful than she was before,” the Man with the Ladder said, his mouth open.
“Wonderful,” Reb Dunzel whispered reverantly.
“You wouldn’t think of selling it,” the Man with the Ladder asked anxiously.
“Not a chance,” Reb Dunzel said. “She’s ours,” he said. The pulled up chairs. “How shall we celebrate?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
Reb Dunzel put their breakfast on the table. They stared at the woman on the wall in front of them over the table. “We’ll celebrate by looking for a while.”
“She’s beautiful,” Reb Dunzel said after a spell of staring at the painting.
“More than beautiful,” the Man with the Ladder commented. “One of a kind,” he said.
§
As the Man with the Ladder was retrieving his ladder from its resting place in the closet next to the garage he heard a coarse, raspy voice whisper to him in a strange accent—but very clearly—”don’t go to the park today.”
“I don’t listen to voices any more,” he replied casually, but his walk to the park was more circumspect and deliberate than usual.
When he got to the park he found it was completely transformed. Instead of the usual grassy spaces and the occasional homeless person sprawled out on a bench, he was greeted by a city of ramshackle campsites. Tents, some taut, some drooping, gray ones and red ones, plain ones and brightly emblazoned ones were pitched everywhere. Sprinkled among them there were hastily thrown-together temporary cardboard dwellings, some crafted carefully others tilting dangerously. People and equipment occupied every available patch of ground.
The temporary housing was gathered into little distinct communities. The occupants of one neighborhood looked like professionals. No one had a complete suit on, but men and women were wearing knitted vests and Italian worsted pants or brightly colored silk skirts. A few wore ties and others sported shirts with unbuttoned button down collars. Other districts were filled with working people, handy men and mechanics, and women embroidering and painting. Tools were scattered about and many of the residents were repairing pieces of the park—fountains that had gone dry and lampposts that had been dark since the park was built. A few areas seemed to be neighborhoods of middle class people. Their occupants were busy taking care of the park lawn, pulling up weeds and combing the grass that had been beaten down by generations of children playing ball.
He spent a few minutes trying to locate ‘his’ spot, the place he usually occupied when he was at the park, but the masses of restless people disoriented him and after a while he gave up in frustration and made his way to the first space not completely taken up by the squatters. Feeling like an intruder, he set up his ladder next to a bench a large family was using as a recreation room. Two adolescents played a video game on a laptop computer, and at the end of the bench and closest to him a grizzled old man tuned a violin.
As soon as he climbed up and sat down on the top rung, a droopy faced man wearing a pork pie hat moved in front of the ladder and looked up at him. The man was dressed in bright orange sneakers and running shorts and a puce and pink stripped shirt that had GUESS emblazoned on the front.
“Are you the king?” he asked politely.
“No,” the Man with the Ladder said, “I’m a man with a ladder who usually sits somewhere over there.” He stretched out his hand in the direction of his usual place in the park.
“You’re sure your not the king?” the man asked again.
“What king?”the Man with the Ladder inquired.
“The king of this tribe,” the man replied.
“No,” the Man with the Ladder answered, and, before he could ask what tribe, the pork pie hat bobbed up and down and drifted off. Halfway toward the group to which he was walking he turned back and waved. ‘They seem friendly enough,’ the Man with the Ladder thought to himself, relaxing. As he sat on the ladder, a number of people walked up to him and asked him the same question and the Man with the Ladder realized that because he was sitting on a ladder and stood out vertically, he was advertising himself as someone, like a lifeguard or a judge, who had answers. He was ready to move down and abandon his perch when someone he recognized came up to him.
“Wipper, is that you?” he asked.
“It’s me,” Wipper said.
“It’s been a while,” the Man with the Ladder said, adding “I haven’t seen you in the park for a long time.” He made a quick inference and asked “Are you with this group?”
“I am,” Wipper said.
“Who are they?”
“Gypsies,” Wipper said, “a tribe of gypsies.”
“What are they doing here?” the Man with the Ladder asked softly. Wipper was someone he had known for a long time. They had grown up together and had been park buddies for many years.
Wipper looked around the crowd of people who were beginning their day before he replied. “They’ve come to be together.”
“Why here?” the Man with the Ladder inquired.
“Why not, it’s a park, a place where strangers gather.”
“But not so many strangers at one time. And the tents?”
“Some of them have come a long way,” was Wipper’s answer.
“What are they doing?”
“They’ve come to see one another and meet their king.”
“Someone just asked me if I was their king,” the Man with the Ladder said confirming what Wipper had just told him.
“It’s a reasonable question,” Wipper said.
“How can they have a king and not know him?” the Man with the Ladder inquired.
“They’ve never had a king before, never been a tribe before.”
“How come now?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“It’s hard to say. It was more or less spontaneous. It just seemed a right time to get together.”
“But the king …”
“Every vista has a baro,” Wipper replied. In response to the Man with the Ladder’s confused look he said, “every tribe of gypsies has a king.”
“They don’t look like gypsies at all,” the Man with the Ladder protested, “at least most of them. They look like …, that group over there looks like bankers. And that group over there looks almost like lawyers or business people. They don’t look like gypsies,” he repeated.
“Oh gypsies come in all flavors,” Wipper said, “doctors and lawyers among them.”
“But they they look like you and me. I mean, their faces, they don’t have gypsy faces. Gypsies come from, from …”
“From
“How are you more or less a gypsy?” the Man with the Ladder wanted to know. “Do they speak Romani?”
“Now yet but I’m sure they will—we will,” he corrected himself, “once we get to be a genuine tribe.”
“So what are you doing here,” the Man with the Ladder asked. “I’ve known you for, for …. We went to public school together,” he said.
“That’s true but I am a gypsy too. In fact, I am the king of this tribe.”
“The man with the ladder looked at Wiper suspiciously. “I’ve known you for a long time. You were never a gypsy when we were children.”
“I was,” Wipper replied, “I just didn’t know it. They way these people were gypsies and did not know it for a long time.”
“How could they be gypsies and not know it,” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Of a lot of people are things they don’t know they are,” Wipper replied matter of factly.
“And how did you get to be king of the tribe,” the Man with the Ladder suspiciosly as if Wipper were testing his credulity.
“The usual way someone becomes king. You’re are born to it, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve known you a long time Wipper. We played together when we were younger,” the Man with the Ladder protested.
“I remember,” Wipper said. “They were fun times. Being king of the
gypsies did not make a difference at all. Of course,” he said, “I did not know
it then. That’s what’s wonderful about
“Do you think your parents knew and hid the truth from you? They
were Italian I remember. From
“No, I don’t think they had a clue,” Wipper said decisively. “Remember the last time we were togther we were talking to Bill about Beatrice. Have you seen him recently?” he asked.
“No,” the Man with the Ladder said sadly, “he had the operation though. I heard about it.”
“I’m glad,” Wipper said. “It meant so much to him.”
“What’s that got to do with your being king of the gypsies?” the Man with the Ladder probed.
“Well that discussion with Bill set me to thinking about who I was. I came to the conclusion I was a gypsy and probably the hospital made a mistake and switched infants and took me away from my gypsy parents and my group. I went visiting gypsies settlements around the country looking for my tribe.”
“Did you find them?”
“No, every group I visited asked me who I knew, and made some
calls, and concluded finally I wasn’t part of their vista. They beat me up a
few times. Gypsies are suspicious—because of the persecutions I suppose. I
visited all of the tribes of gypsies in
The Man with the Ladder thought a minute. “They want to see the country, see different places, different sights.”
“Some,” Wipper said, “but not most.
“We built up a history. I collected a lot of stories and wrote them down. I would leave a collection of stories with owners of yards filled with old cars and people would drop in and they would add stories and I would pick them up again and leave a new collection. We got on the internet. In the end we had a tribe and a history. And, as things turn out I am their king.”
“Oh,” the Man with the Ladder said, “oh.” He thought for a moment.
“Are you are sure you are not a lost tribe of
“No, we are Gypsies,” Wipper said emphatically.
“But Gypsies have been persecuted, people treat them as pariahs.”
“That’s life,” Wipper said, “that’s the way the cookie crumbles. We didn’t have a choice. We looked around for who were and it came up Gypsy. That’s the end to it. We didn’t pick who we were, we just are what we are.”
“Perhaps the other gypsies tribes will recognize you as one of them,” the Man with the Ladder added optimistically.
“I hope so,”Wipper said.”It’s hard enough being rejected by the world around you but to be rejected by ones kin and kith …”
“Why did they come together here?” the Man with the Ladder asked again, as if a second answer would get rid of the confusion that hung around the gathering.
“Just to see one another. Just to bring the tribe together.”
“I wonder how come the police haven’t dispersed them, they are usually very vigilant,” the Man with the Ladder suggested.
Wipper pointed to a collection of large tents with a big flag at the edge of the park. “That’s the chief of police’s tent,” he said. “He gave orders that the camp not be disturbed—as long as we didn’t create a disturbance.”
As they were talking the man wearing the pork pie hat came up again and spoke to the Man with the Ladder. “Are you sure you are not the king?” he asked.
“I’m not,” the Man with the Ladder answered, “he is.” He pointed to Wipper.
The man whacked Wipper on the back and gave him a bear hug. “I never met you on the road. I just found out who I was last week,” he explained and they began an animated discussion.
As they stood talking other men and women came up and after a little while there was a swarm of people in front of the ladder. Sometimes the women curtseyed. The men thrust out hands or grabbed Wipper in a bear hug. Most of them looked into Wipper’s eyes and wiped away tears from their own. Occasionally a child was thrust into his arms and he looked at the child and sometimes he kissed it, sometimes he just touched its cheek. “He’s a beautiful child,” he would say, “take care of him,” or “ she will grow up and be a splendid member of the tribe.”
After while the Man with the Ladder tapped Wipper on the shoulder. “Why don’t you climb up on the ladder,” he said. As he watched Wipper settle on a rung that brought him just a head above the crowd surrounding him he said, as loudly as he could, but with a voice that was lost in the noise and commotion, “I’ll pick up the ladder tomorrow.” The crowd was still growing as he walked off and he was not sure where the ladder would be in a few days but the same raspy voice that had warned him about going to the park returned and whispered to him “don’t worry.”
§
It was a clay and mud day, gritty and opaque, pitted and murky—a day of plastic weather and gelatinous light. The day oozed a slobbery goo which coated everything, including people, who walked around compulsively wiping their hands on their shirts and blouses and shaking their heads making shadows slip and slide from one object to another blurring things more—a midden heap of a day, entirely runoff and spoilage.
The Man with the Ladder stared and squinted into the day but he could not bring it into focus, and the only thing he could make out was a chaotic smear, a formless blur. After a while, he decided it was one of those primordial cosmological anomalies that lasted a long time out of which, eventually, ordinary time and weather and objects and human activity precipitated.
Bent and soggy as he was, the Man with the Ladder jerked and contracted like a muscle when he saw the Zen Master doing his hop, slide and skip walk up the path towards him. His palms sweated and the hairs on his head stood up on their roots and rhumba’ed and and samba’ed on his scalp as the Zen Master approached.
Whenever he met the Zen Master and his two apprentices, the unexpected happened, not the ordinary, every day unexpected, but the completely whacked out of this world, very improbable, unexpected unexpected—usually with the result that the Man with the Ladder‘s world was completely unscrewed and knocked down then reassembled in an altogether unfamiliar way, and he stumbled around in a dazed stupor for a couple of days until he got used to the new tilt of his life. Sometimes the Zen Master did this by rapidly yanking something entirely foreign and alien into the Man with the Ladder’s world, sometimes by swiftly pushing something out of it, something to which the spokes of everything else in his world were connected.
Whenever he spoke with the Zen Master, the Zen Master’s two apprentices, a black girl on the skate board and a scrawny red haired boy, always hid behind the nearest tree, poking their heads out as if, even at a distance, watching their teacher talking to someone could teach them something profound and the Man with the Ladder always wondered whether it was this that spooked him most.
“Hello,” the Zen Master said warmly. “Very gooey day, a day like a bowl of melted tofu.”
“Like pudding with cold chicken soup sauce,” the Man with the Ladder replied.
“Why don’t you climb down from the ladder and go home,” the Zen Master suggested.
“No,” the Man with the Ladder answered, “I want to see what’s going to happen.”
“What do you expect will happen?” the Zen Master asked.
“Nothing,” the Man with the Ladder said, “and after nothing at all happens and the afternoon is over I’ll go home. But it is too early to quit waiting,” he added.
“You may melt and dissolve before that,” the Zen Master said, his voice telling the Man with the Ladder that it was appropriate to laugh, but the Man with the Ladder only stiffened and crinkled his upper lip defensively simulating a smile.
The Zen Master seemed only interested in the weather. “It is an exceptionally blurry day, the weather seems bloated and misshapen. There’s a squeaking breeze somewhere but it seems to be lost in a soupy maze of clouds.” The Man with the Ladder convinced himself that the weather was too shallow a subject to hide a profound yanking or pushing maneuver, so he relaxed. As the Zen Master’s words skimmed the soggy, frayed surface of the day the Man with the Ladder unlocked his body. He was nearly completely elongated and stretched out when he suddenly contracted and began shaking again.
“You are very jumpy today, very unstable,” the Zen Master commented. “Squeaky breezes are powerful, but not enough to make you shake. What’s the matter with you?” he asked solicitously.
“Don’t you hear them?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Hear who?” the Zen Master cocked his head, “birds whining over the ocean …”
“No, not the birds, them,” the Man with the Ladder said emphatically.
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” the Zen Master said. “I hear the birds whining and a bloated breeze squeaking in the trees, and Mr. and Mrs. Zippler coming towards us but …”
“That’s the who I mean,” the Man with the Ladder said, “the Zipplers. Lets move, quickly.”
“Where should we move to,” the Zen Master asked, “and why?” In a distracted, absentminded way he he sketched a portrait of the park with his fingers.
“Anywhere—before they get here.”
“Have you insulted them, do you owe them money, have you made a promise you did not keep?” the Zen Master asked.
“None of those things,” the Man with the Ladder said. “They are always getting into endless, meaningless domestic arguments about nothing at all, and they suck you up in them suddenly, the way a revolution snags a tourist on vacation: one minute you’re sipping expresso in a quiet café, the next you’re in the middle of a firefight between rebels and the local militia. Most days I get swept up and enjoy their bickering, but today I don’t think I could take it.”
“You couldn’t be more mistaken,” the Zen Master insisted. “I meet them frequently,” he said “and they never fight around me. Relax,” he commanded and shifted his body so that it blocked the path of the Man with the Ladder’s retreat down the ladder.
Mr. Zippler, wearing a tweed jacket, a smooth peach shirt and a fat, ornate yellow and purple tie and Mrs. Zippler, plump and stocky, in a summer frock with purple and puce polkadots, bobbed gracefully around a tree. The Zen Master greeted them warmly.
“How are you two?” the Zen Master asked.
Mr and Mrs. Zippler seemed rather confused to see the Zen Master and the Man with the Ladder together. The looked first at one then the other.
“We are fine,” they answered together. “How are you, you two.”
“Fine,” the Man with the Ladder replied somewhat hesitantly. “I’m fine too,” the Zen Master added brightly. “If you were looking for the Man with the Ladder, don’t pay any attention to me.”
“It’s nothing really private,” Mr. Zippler said. He turned to the Man with the Ladder. “I got a letter from Bill. He said he had the operation and it went exceedingly well and he is nearly almost all Beatrice, almost all of the time, almost permanently, now.”
“Most people are unhappy about who they are and ask why,” Mrs.
Zippler muttered under her breath. “He is unhappy and asks ‘why not’ and does.
Most people blame the people they are connected to for their trouble—husbands,
wives lovers, UPS delivery men—not the sex to which they are moored. Bill,
Beatrice,” Mrs. Zippler said under her breath, “he should have been called
Mr. Zippler defended his friend. “He found himself in an awkward
and undeservedly difficult spot and made a little move.
Mrs. Zippler ignored
“What trouble,” Mr. Zippler asked innocently, “what change?”
“Not likely,” Mrs. Zippler said. “Not likely at all.”
Mr. Zippler took a deep breath. “Dearest, one thing today, definitely we shouldn’t argue, no arguments. The day is not a proper backdrop for an argument, it’s too sticky, too draining.”
“You are right, duckums,” Mrs. Zippler said. “Absolutely not, today absolutely no arguing, She looked around. “This day would suck the heart out of an argument and spit it out twisted and all knotted up. Arguing today would be self defeating, silly. No arguing today,” Mrs. Zippler agreed. “But what made you think we might argue,” she asked guilelessly, “we hardly ever argue.”
“That’s true, of course, dearest. I just thought we might be especially careful. There are days …”
“We hardly ever argue,” Mrs. Zippler insisted. “We’ve been married
thirty years and …”
“Twenty nine, dearest,” Mr. Zippler said immediately.
“Thirty. I remember distinctly. You proposed during the great storm. I remember …”
“Twenty nine, absolutely. I proposed in the spring, when we had just come back from our pre-honeymoon in Marseille, the azaleas were in bloom and we were married the next day. It was in the spring of the year there was a dry spell.”
“That was the year before,” Mrs. Zippler said slowly and distinctly for emphasis. “We had been married two months. It was after … ”
“The great storm was the year after, dumpling. I remember
distinctly because my sister was caught in the great pounding rain in
“Your sister moved to
“Has it been thirty years,” Mr Zippler replied after a pause. “It seems like, like yesterday. “
“Thirty years,” Mrs. Zippler repeated. “And in that thirty years we’ve hardly every argued.”
The Man with the Ladder looked at the Zen Master but he seemed completely absorbed in the Zippler’s argument.
“That’s true, my dearest. Occasionally.”
“Now and then, perhaps, not an argument, more a kind of minor misunderstanding,” Mrs. Zippler qualified her statement with a purr.
“An extended confusion,” Mr. Zippler offered as a clarification.
“And the few arguments we’ve had. I forget how they started. I usually try to avoid them by agreeing with you pleasantly. I’ve hardly ever disagree.”
“No matter who usually starts an argument we won’t argue today,” Mr. Zippler announced sweetly.
“Today is certainly not a particular good day for arguing,” Mrs. Zippler echoed. “Today you could completely lose your way in an argument, get completely, absolutely lost. It’s a very foggy, slippery, day.”
“Of course you can’t help it sometimes,” her husband chimed in, “regardless of the weather, regardless of the danger. I know it’s not what you mean to happen but you can’t help yourself. When there nothing to argue about you find something. But we won’t argue today.”
“You don’t have to keep reminding me,” Mrs. Zippler snapped back. “I hardly ever begin an argument,” she said. “But sometimes the smallest thing sets you off—a simple correction, and you argue.”
“Well not today, dearest, if you can keep your corrections to a very bare minimum, we can avoid arguing.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Zippler said, “but sometimes even a minuscule correction and you are off, beside yourself.”
“Off?” Mr. Zippler said loudly.
“Off, a sheep to a salt lick.”
“Off,” screamed Mr. Zippler.
“Off,” Mrs. Zippler said solidly, “a lemming to a cliff. Off on an argument,” she stated caustically. “But not today,” she said. “Nothing to argue about. Except keeping to a decision like not arguing isn’t easy for some people. Me I don’t usually have any trouble.”
“You’re right of course, bunny,” Mr. Zippler gritted his teeth. “Lets change the subject.”
“Arguments are not productive,” Mrs. Zippler insisted. “I always say that, even when you insist you are right and begin arguing about …”
“When I am arguing,” Mr. Zippler bellowed in an offended tone. “You’re the one who picks out the smallest point and makes a federal case out of it. Pick, pick, pick. A stone would bleed.”
“When you are making an argument happen …”
“But not today,” Mr. Zippler insisted, clenching his jaw.
“No, today of course you are all sweetness and agreeableness, but other times you are not so full of pleasantness. I remember our first argument,” Mrs. Zippler reminisced. “A minor glitch.”
“Eleven months,” Mr. Zippler said, “it lasted 11 months. You spent most of it in the bathroom.”
“I was a little upset,” Mrs. Zippler said.
“I had to use the neighbors bathroom,”
Mr. Zippler complained, “
The Man with the Ladder tried to catch the Zen Master eye, hoping he might get him to step in and try to stop the argument, but the Zen Master stared at the Zipplers as if he were waiting for something.
Mrs. Zippler pushed Beverley aside and looked at Mr. Zippler. “I know how to argue,” she said, getting ready to give him a demonstration.
“You don’t pumkins. You know how to yes-no, green-red argue but not really argue.”
Mrs. Zippler waded in huffing. “If anyone is incompetent when it comes to arguing it’s you. The best you can work yourself up to is some wimpy contradiction. That’s not an argument.”
“Exactly what I mean, darling. Facts don’t mean a thing to you. For you only irrelevancies matter. And you always pick the smallest irrelevancy as a basis for an argument.”
“Anything is a big thing if you get in front of it and put you face right up to it,” Mrs. Zippler explained.
“That might be true for a person of small stature, pumpkins, but from higher up, even from higher up on your tiptoes, it’s another matter. You couldn’t see a boulder in front of you.” Mr. Zippler positioned himself in front of her. “Subtlety escapes you,” he said shaking his finger at her, “you make everything a shade of gray. You have no sense of color, no sense at all. You try, I give you credit for that, pumpkins. You really try. It’s just that you never learned how to argue.”
“My mother taught me to argue,” Mrs. Zippler said. “She was the best.”
Mr. Zippler dismissed his wife’s mother, “Your mother is thump and noise. Some model. Now my mother, my mother argued with everyone.”
“‘Everyone’ is amateurs,” Mrs. Zippler said dismissively. “My mother only argued with my father. She taught him to argue. He learned as opposed to some people. They would fight for weeks on end. They had no time to argue with anyone else because they argued with each other all the time.”
“Domestic squabbles,” Mr. Zippler asserted. “My mother argued with everyone. She argued with the butcher, about cutting meat, and with the local councilman about garbage collection and taxes, and the doctor about diseases and the postman about …”
Mr. Zippler took a breath and looked at the Zen Master who nodded his head and smiled broadly.
Mrs. Zippler used the break to change the subject. “Why aren’t you wearing your glasses?” Mrs. Zippler asked her husband suddenly.
“I don’t need glasses. Only for reading.”
“You need your glasses for seeing anything. You are …”
“I don’t,” he said, looking out in the park. “I see things distinctly and clearly.”
“Clearly blind,” she said, finishing her thought. “You are a living Mr. Magoo,” she pointed to a tree at the end of the park. “What am I pointing to,” she demanded to know.
The Man with the Ladder followed Mrs. Zippler’s finger but the park in front of him was a blurred, indiscernible, expanse. The outlines of the trees he knew were in front of him were shadowy and indistinct.
“A tree,” Mr. Magoo said.
“That’s all that’s out there, trees. What kind of a tree?” Mrs. Zippler inquired loudly, as if the question were a hint.
“A green tree,” Mr. Zippler said. “A green tree.”
“A green tree,” Mrs. Zippler said dismissively. “All trees are green. But is it a big tree or a small tree?”
“Fireworks,” Mr. Zippler said. “A tree like an soundless explosion, fireworks at a great distance pulled into the sky.”
“A fan, a green fan,” Mrs. Zippler said as she squinted. “It’s a tree like a fan. If you were wearing your glasses you would see it’s a …” She stared into the murky air in front of her. “It’s a tree. A tree like a fan.”
“I can see it’s a tree Mr. Zippler said. “A tree that explodes into the sky. Green—a treeish, green flecked …”
“More like a fan that opens gently in the hand.”
“A fan,” Mr. Zippler repeated in disblief. “It’s not like a fan at all.”
“A fan definitely,” Mrs. Zippler said.
“Not like a fan at all,” Mr. Zippler repeated.
“Exactly like a fan,” Mrs. Zippler said looking out. “A fan made of pussy willows. The buds half broken out. Buds curled in on themselves, peeking out, softly.”
“Firecrackers, pushing themselves into the world, angry, explosive. More like buds of fireworks, fireworks, percussive green eruptions, fuzzy yellow blowouts, miniature brown bursts containing the energy of spring,” Mr. Zippler said.
“Poetic, very poetic,” Mrs. Zippler said. “But it’s fall, nearly winter,” Mrs. Zippler reminded him.
“I know the season. And its a mucky day. But the tree there is spring fireworks on a sunny spring day.”
“Your imagination is running amuck,” Mrs. Zippler said. “You are always making something out of nothing. And then you make something out of the something you made out of nothing. Imagination run amuck,” she repeated.
“For some situations in life, living with some people, a wild imagination is a more of a necessity than food or glasses, or a green fan,” Mr. Zippler repeated, “green for catching the air.”
“For pointing out things that need pointing out. And the tree next to it,” Mrs. Zippler asked pointing again.
“A thick leaf like a cushion for hiding a trees nakedness.”
“You only have one thing on your mind,” Mrs. Zippler said.
“Thick stumps of trees, cushions of trees fluffed out, plump.”
“Stumps I know about,” Mrs. Zippler said.
“Thick,” Mr. Zippler repeated.
“On bright spring nights in your dreams, maybe. And that …” Mrs. Zippler asked returning to her proof that her husband needed glasses. She pointed again, shifting her direction a bit.
“A tree,” Mr. Zippler said. “Of course your arm blots out most of what I can see. Either that tree is flapping in the wind or your arm is. You really must loose some weight.”
“I am thin enough. If I were any thinner you couldn’t make me out even in the daytime. As it is at night you lose …”
“Couldn’t lose you at night, Mr. Zippler replied. “You are beginning to spread all over the bed,” Mr. Zippler complained. “When you turn the bed groans and squeaks and …”
“Moaning and squealing I know about,” Mrs. Zippler said. “You can’t find me as I am, in …”
“Another tree,” Mr. Zippler interjected. “Another tree. Only this one, like a cushion of light, a plump little puff of light.”
“Redish,” Mrs. Zippler said.
“Yellow. Shifting layers of yellow and green.”
“Where?”
“There,” Mr. Zippler pointed. “Who’s blind now?”
“You’re blind,” Mrs. Zippler asserted, “I don’t see it.”
“You are looking in the wrong place,” Mr. Zippler said. “You are always searching in the wrong place. Your sense of direction is abominable.”
“It is not.” Mrs. Zippler said.
“You get lost coming home from an outhouse,” Mr. Zippler stated.
“It was in
“Light, the trees gave off light. They didn’t reflect it, they gave it off like that tree and you couldn’t find yourself back to where you started from. That tree is glowing light, a light bulb, a green and yellow lightbulb,” Mr. Zippler said. “And all you could find was an adventure with the gypsies.”
“I don’t see anything like that,” Mrs. Zippler confessed. “Where?”
“There exactly,” Mr. Zippler made a gross motion with his arm.
“You are pointing out dark things,” Mrs. Zippler said, reaching in her handbag and taking out a pair of glasses. “It was an adventure, gypsies. I was green, young, innocent.”
“Who needs glasses now,” Mr. Zippler said gloating. “You are putting on your reading glasses,” Mr. Zippler reminded her.
“Sometimes they help see dark things are at a great distance. The dark shapes, one distinct, one closer in. What are you pointing to?” Mrs. Zippler asked again.
“The dark things that are obviously trees holding in the light, holding in the autumn. The short squat trees, strutted like a bridge or a fortress.”
“They don’t look like trees to me, only the idea of trees. No detail,” Mrs. Zippler complained.
“You are looking in the wrong direction,” Mr. Zippler said pushing his wife so that she faced in a different direction. “What do you see now?”
“Nothing.”
“Grass, not nothing,” Mr. Zippler corrected. “Grass, leading up to a fence.”
Mrs. Zippler squinted through the glasses. “Now, hulking things.”
“You are looking at the Man with the Ladder and the Zen Master.” Mr. Zippler said with a self satisfied look on his face.
“We started off on the wrong foot,” Mrs. Zippler complained.
“You are right peachy pie,” Mr. Zippler agreed. “How about there?” he said as he turned taking her original position.
The Man with the Ladder interrupted them. “I’m afraid,” he said, beginning to climb down from the ladder.
“A disappointment,” Mr. Zippler said. “We didn’t …” The couple looked sad and disheartened.
“It’s just,” the Man with the Ladder said, “just …”
“Don’t bother, Mr. Zippler said. “No need to get down off the ladder. “It is a difficult day,” Mrs. Zippler added, “and we didn’t help. It will probably improve on its own. We are sorry,” she apologized again.
“No need to apologize at all,” the Zen Master said, beaming at the couple. “It was a pleasure.”
“Thank you, Mr. Zippler said gratefully. “I’m sure we’ll see you again soon,” he added, and the couple headed off arm in arm down the curving path they had come in on.
The instant they had disappeared from view, the Man with the Ladder turned to the Zen Master. “See I told you so. They fought.”
“Of course they fought. But they fought only for you,” the Zen Master said. “For me they wouldn’t have fought. For me they would have been sweetness and light.”
“What does that mean?” the Man with the Ladder grumbled, offended because he though the Zen Master was accusing him of being responsible for the Zippler’s domestic problems. “Whenever they have an audience they fight.”
“I happen to know that’s not true,” the Zen Master said. “They hardly ever fight around anyone else. They mostly fight around you. It holds your attention.”
The Man with the Ladder took the assertion as another charge in the indictment. “I didn’t provoke them,” he said, avowing his innocence defensively. “I was just sitting here.”
“Of course you didn’t provoke them. They saw you were unhappy with this day. They wanted to give you a gift of another day.”
“What are you trying to say?” the Man with the Ladder asked suspiciously.
“They saw the day was soaking into you, making your insides murky
and dark. They thought that if they could give you another day, a bright sunny
“Cezanne. Yes. The card players, Mrs. Cezanne. Yes.”
“There is a Cezanne painting, a garden, his father’s garden, the sky cool and pebbled, five or six trees in a garden, clear and distinct, grass in the foreground, a fence.”
“I think I know the one you mean,” the Man with the Ladder said. “But what’s that Cezanne painting got to do with the Zipplers fight?”
“It was a gift.”
“The fight was a gift?”
“Not the fight, the pattern of the fight, the Cezanne painting,” the Zen Master corrected.
The Man with the Ladder looked bewildered.
“If a ballet company had danced in front of you would you have spent your time staring at their costumes. If Cezanne was painting that picture in front of you would you have spent all of you time thinking about the fact that he was using a number four flat and oils instead of a sable round and water colors.”
The Man with the Ladder was offended. “Of course not, just enough …”
“Exactly. But you couldn’t look past the surface of the Zippler’s performance, past its costume, its medium.”
“What performance, what painting?” the Man with the Ladder whined. “What are you talking about. They fought. A fight, not a ballet with costumes, not a painting.”
The Zen Master stuck his face very close to the Man with the Ladder’s face. “What kind of fight was it? How did they move from point to point? How did the pieces of the argument fit together? What path did the argument take? Was there one focus or two or three? What kinds of feelings did different parts of it arouse?”
“What are you talking about?” the Man with the Ladder said. “They fought. It was a he said, she said, no, yes argument.”
“They wasted it on you,” the Zen Master said sadly, disheartened that the Man with the Ladder had no clue what he was talking about. “And they went to a lot of effort, I expect they’re both exhausted. And it was wasted.”
“What was wasted?” The Man with the Ladder murmured.
“Their beautiful dance, their ballet, their painting. Didn’t you even notice the rhythm of the argument? Didn’t you even see the pallet of different colors they were using to make points, the way they played one point against the other? Didn’t you pay attention to the rhythm of the argument? They gave you a Cezanne painting and you only saw a fight.”
“It didn’t have a rhythm, it was a fight,” the Man with the Ladder insisted.
“Of course it had a rhythm. And it had form and movement and color—trees and grass and a sky if you looked carefully,” he said quietly.
The Man with the Ladder tried to think for a moment over the buzzing in his ear. “You’re saying …” The Zen Master cocked his head and listened carefully to what the Man with the Ladder thought he was saying. “You are saying that the argument was like a painting, a particular Cezanne painting.”
“Exactly.”
“An argument like a painting of a forest where the trees are caught by a breeze and bend and brush against another but don’t crash against one another because they are anchored in common gound,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“Just so,” the Zen Master nodded.
“A painting like an argument where the words of the two arguers fold gently into one another like branches and the bulky trunks of arguments stand and mock the opponents to cut them down.”
“Very much like that painting, like that argument.”
“An argument like a painting of a garden where trees run in a row and some bend back in the shadows and some lean forward away from the light,” The Man with the Ladder the ladder saw the painting in his mind. “A painting like an argument where the words of the two arguers rub densely against one another but they breath the same light and air.” The Zipplers reappeared in his mind disputing Marseille. “An argument,” he continued, “ like a painting where the sky air is like a scaffold against which the trees are tied and secured.”
The Man with the Ladder gazed at the assembled pieces of the Zipplers argument. When he looked out at the park he saw laid obliquely over the fuzzy scene in front of him the clear, distinct Cezanne day. He felt his world tilt and heard the wires and cables holding him in place snap. “I see it,” he said, “the argument, the Cezanne day.”
The Zen Master’s apprentices poked out from behind a tree but the Zen Master yelled something at them and they darted back.
“How can you put the pattern of a day or the painting of a day into a fight. It doesn’t make sense,” the Man with the Ladder protested the Cezanne day floating before his eyes, refracting sharpening and reshaping the soupy park in front of him.
“The pattern,” the Zen Master explained softly as if he were teaching abc’s to a child, “the secret is the pattern, the skeleton. Under the surface of everything there’s a skeleton, a form. And if you pull out the pattern of a thing, isolate its skeleton, you can dress it up in a quite different costume, make it into a poem, or a story or even, even some theory of physics. Of course there are only a few physicists who are really good at it,” he said matter of factly. “A good painter or poet locks you inside the painting or the poem and you never get to see the pattern alone, separate from the costume they have given it. Good artists never let the pattern escape. They close off all of the paths by which the pattern can flee so that you can only see the pattern if you stay inside the painting or the poem. But the greatest painters and poets and arguers leave a back door, an opening so that the spirit can escape and you can see it. The Zipplers took the pattern of the Cezanne day and disguised it to look like a argument and gave it to you. They are very, very talented,” he said appreciatively.
“Why did they go to the trouble,” the Man with the Ladder asked weakly. “Why didn’t they just tell me about the painting,” the Man with the Ladder wanted to know, “describe it to me.”
“Could you have seen it, really seen it?” the Zen Master asked. “In the mood you’re in you would have tossed off a description of the painting, you would have thrown off the painting itself if they had shown it to you. You would have spit it out the way a child spits out a bitter medicine. But an argument, a fight, now there is something that you can get your teeth into. No matter what you think, you have no defenses against a fight on a day like this—on most days I think. So they gave you the day wrapped in a fight and thought once you got into it you would see the Cezanne day and since you were in it, you could just lift it up and carry it around with you like a pair of glasses for the rest of the day. Every great artist knows that people are very touchy about having their psyche messed with. Like most patterns it had to be sweetened and colored like a child’s medicine before you would swallow it.”
He yelled at his apprentices and they skipped off down the path in front of him. “Enjoy the rest of the day,” he yelled at the Man with the Ladder as he moved away.
The Man with the Ladder stood quietly for a moment before he climbed back up the ladder. He conjured up the Zipplers arguing, and the Cezanne painting the argument presented, and peered at the day through it until the afternoon ended, and even after the sun had dimmed and the day stopped trembling in front of him, he stared at the park savoring its colors and shapes.
§
The Man with the Ladder was what everyone called him, everyone. In the end it was what he called himself.
For a while, after no one called him anything else, he clung to his last name for formal affairs like weddings and circumcisions, and used his first name on those informal occasions when he wanted to criticize himself severely. But finally, he gave them both up and forgot them.
He got the name because he carried a ladder around almost all the time.
He depended on it for work. He did mostly odd jobs. He changed light bulbs in high places, he painted ceilings, he filled high shelves, he retrieved animals from trees. He would do anything that required a man to situate himself in a vertically inaccessible place, a man with a ladder.
When he wasn’t working, he carried the ladder around anyway. At first, he told himself it was because you could never tell when a job might present itself. After a while he surrendered that illusion and accepted the simple truth that he liked to look out at the world from the very top step of the ladder. People who didn’t know him well thought it was because he felt superior and they used the allegation of arrogance to cut him down to size whenever they spotted him looming above them. Others who knew him a little better said that he sat on the ladder only to bring himself up to the eye level of the rest of the world, because, even though he was six feet tall, he seemed to be stuck in a hole three feet deep.
One of his regular jobs was to clean the family mausoleums of
retired people who had quit their ancestors and moved to
This work paid better than most jobs he had because, besides his labor on the ladder, he wrote little reports to each of his customers, about the state of their departed, or at least the state of the environment of their departed—for which he charged extra.
He felt a little guilty about the surcharge because for him these jobs were more vacations than work. The cemetery was like a botanical garden. Even in the sections where the poorer dead were laid out toe to crown, there were festivals of greenery and color. And, in the exclusive districts where the cemetery association sold plots that were ferociously expensive, generous stands of trees were left practically undisturbed. In these select areas, the wealthy dead rested in a privacy that was unattainable even for the wealthy living—who always had relatives who needed them or servants who they needed—nearly alone, at least with ten yards of forest between them and their closest neighbor.
Before starting work, he would walk in one of these forested areas, adroitly avoiding the grave sites. During these walks he often talked to his own dead father, describing the forest and reminding him subtly that it had been his own choice to be cremated. He guiltily ignored the voice in his head, which he understood to be his father’s, that responded that he would not have rested here, but in the crowded plot at the other end of the cemetery, cheek to jowl with landsmen and relatives he was glad to be free of.
It was on a loose and fluffy spring day, a day on which other
people might have impulsively chosen to play hooky from work and go shopping or
fishing, that he made up his mind to go to
She had had a dream, a bad dream, and wanted him to touch up the family mausoleum. He reminded her that she had paid him to clean and polish it only a month ago, but she insisted he comb and brush the stone house and the grounds again. In this dream, she had seen her recently deceased husband Saul, covered with brambles and ivy, pointing a rooty finger either at her or the younger man who stood beside her: the dream had disturbed her.
The mausoleum he had to groom commanded one of the best locations of the cemetery. It was at the top of one of the two rolling hills that stood opposite one another like dignified guardians of the dead. And it had the crest almost to itself.
A majestic but tastefully understated avenue flowed along the base of these hills like a quiet river. It swirled in a gentle arc from the entrance to the cemetery, past the inconspicuous, ivy encrusted administration building to the farthest reaches of the graveyard and back again. A rustic but functional road nipped off of this avenue and, defying gravity, curled up to a forested glade on the peak of the hill, out of which the corners and a face of the mausoleum poked. A fake window had been set in the exposed side of the mausoleum so the dead might appreciate the view.
He spent the morning walking and talking to his father, and it was
past
Hardly anything ever happened in the cemetery: it was very well run. The dead and the living came together occasionally: people were buried, of course, but unobtrusively and discretely. He had made friends with the chubby, superstitious secretary who worked in the administration building where he signed in when he had work to do in the cemetery. She would tell him when and where the days’s burials were scheduled. He tried to avoid working close to funerals, both out of respect and to avoid the subtle impression that he might be soliciting future customers.
Because she had said nothing that morning, he was surprised to look down from his perch and see, in an open circle of ground surrounded by young trees, just below the ledge on which the steps of the ladder rested, a small, half dug grave. What was even more disturbing was the fact that when he looked across the valley to the peak on his left there was a twin, larger partially dug grave there as well. He squirmed on the ladder for a few minutes trying to decide if he should climb down and go home—or at least go walking elsewhere.
He assumed the holes meant dead and dead meant burial. But one fracture in the order of things might imply others so that it was possible that people had been taken out and the graves had been thoughtlessly left open. As he was trying to decide, he looked down and saw a minister moving slowly up the road towards him.
The cleric’s robes clung to his thin frame like work clothes and he moved like an old, poorly repaired puppet, slowly, effortfully rearranging braces, struts and pivots with each step.
The Man with the Ladder decided to sit and wait. As a vacation in the country, the day was ruined. But the minister’s presence and the graves hinted that he might be able to hold the day out like an open bag, to be filled with interesting, unusual events.
The minister turned off the avenue and labored up the hill. When he got to the partially dug grave he stopped. The features of his face rearranged themselves into a cartoon display of surprise. He produced an eruption of clerical anger and spun around quickly and hobbled down the hill again and set off towards the administration building.
The Man with the Ladder followed the figure until he disappeared over the rise in the road then turned back to the mausoleum. He took out a rag and a can of polish and began shining the wide brass strip that circled the top of the stone building. He had gotten almost to where he had to move the ladder when he saw the truck that belonged to the ground crew of the cemetery coming down the road.
It chugged along like a sluggish locomotive, laying down a steady cloud of dark, billowing exhaust. It made a wide, lazy turn up the road leading to the grave site. He could see the minister in the front seat and the grave diggers piled into the back of the truck talking and joking among themselves.
When it stopped, the minister got down slowly and carefully as he might from a mulish horse. He rushed up to the grave site and yelled at the driver who, in turn, barked a few sharp commands to the men in the back of the truck. They tumbled chaotically out, jostling one another as rough sleepers might, and meandered to the grave site, shovels resting softly on their shoulders.
They seemed to choose among themselves and two of them leapt into the grave and began digging furiously while the other two leaned on their shovels and gave directions, animating themselves occasionally to rearrange the accumulating dirt into another neater pile.
This activity went on long enough for the grave to be enlarged by a quarter or so—but still not deep enough to encompass fully anything but a very small person’s coffin—when the Man with the Ladder noticed a large limousine gliding smoothly down the avenue towards them. It slid by the road that led up to the mausoleum and stopped at the base of the neighboring peak.
A uniformed driver emerged, bent down in front of the window that had been lowered a crack, and talked to the passenger in the rear seat. Then he scurried up to the top of the hill, looked at the grave, yelled something back, turned and immediately scurried down the hill again. He disappeared into the car which made a sharp U turn and sped soundlessly away toward the cemetery administration building.
After a few minutes the Man with the Ladder saw the pudgy manager of the cemetery, a napkin still stuffed in his collar, running down the avenue, yelling. When the manager’s voice reached the driver of the ground crew truck, he got out of the truck and respectfully walked a little way down the hill towards him.
The words scattered in the air and drifted away, but the driver seemed to catch the gist of the message. He strode back to the open grave and grunted something at the grave diggers. The two who had been working in the grave crawled out. After a little discussion between them, three of the four men with shovels climbed into the back of the truck. The Man with the Ladder watched as it pushed off, dipped down the road, turned sharply and raced up the hill opposite him to the other freshly dug half grave.
The minister was distraught. He cupped his hand over his mouth and yelled fruitlessly to the cemetery manager who had already turned and was walking back towards the administration center. The minister swiveled to fret at the remaining grave digger, a short, bull shaped, middle aged stump of a man with a head of hair cropped like a field of harvested wheat, who sat with his feet dangling into the incomplete grave.
The seated figure ignored the older man’s anxiety. The minister spoke to him, wringing his hands and using the bottom of his robe to wipe the sweat that was accumulating on his brow. The grave digger shrugged and pushed himself into the hole and bent over so that his bulk disappeared from view. The only indicator of his presence was intermittent squirts of dirt and periodic grunts and curses soaring out of the grave. Across the hill, the recently shifted crew leapt into the grave and began to dig furiously.
As two clouds played hide and seek with the sun, the Man with the
Ladder started an argument with himself whether he should charge the
As he sat debating the issue, he noticed an old couple appear on the avenue from the direction of the back end of the cemetery. They looked up first at the patch of activity on the neighboring hill that was directly above them. They hesitated for a minute, then they meandered along a bit and looked up toward the minister. They conferred quietly and turned up the road. He followed their wandering until they came abreast of the minister.
“Is this the Schwartz funeral?” the man asked.
The Man with the Ladder saw the minister shake his head from side to side. The old woman’s voice was distinct.
“Well it seems like it’s going to be a pleasant funeral.” She looked down the hill. “Do you mind if we stay?”
The minster shook his head from side to side again. With this permission the old couple sought out the shade of one of the trees and leaned against it searching around for something to sit on.
The Man with the Ladder saw the top of the grave diger’s head bob up suddenly. Then his body emerged and he scrambled out, struggling to find a foothold in the soft dirt. The materialization of the grave digger from the grave startled the old couple. He was covered with dirt, and sweat had carved out rivulets on his face so that it looked like a map of some harsh, alien territory.
The grave diggers wriggling free of the grave had a ghoulish air to it. As soon as he got out, he plunged into the undergrowth around the grave, emerging a moment later with a substantial weathered tree limb. He propped it up as a seat, spent a moment brushing off the clinging dirt and leaves and then collapsed on it. His body spread out on the limb and he rested until he looked up and noticed the old couple leaning against the tree. He rose deliberately and formally offered his seat to them, squatting, bent and immobile beside them as they sat down.
The Man with the Ladder watched until his eyes were pulled away to the face car of a long, snaking procession of limousines gliding silently and smoothly down the avenue towards them. The car holding the most earnest mourners caught the sunlight and seemed to push it along the road towards the twin peaks. The supervisor of the digging party on the other hill spotted the procession and barked at the three grave diggers who scrambled out of the hole and leapt into the truck which sped down the road and escaped in the opposite direction just as the first of the cars of the elongated, winding funeral procession turned up the sister hill.
Headlights blaring light that pierced even the glare of the sun, the cars discharged their passengers and fled down the hill again, their skilled drivers maneuvering carefully past one another on the narrow road.
As the Man with the Ladder watched, the last vehicle of the procession slowed as it reached the road leading up to mausoleum and, instead of proceeding with the other cars to the farther hill, turned up the road to where he, the minister, the old couple and the lone grave digger waited. Almost soundlessly its occupants deposited a casket and the equipment necessary to lower it into the grave, and disappeared without uttering a word.
As the minster rose quietly, he noticed the Man with the Ladder watching the proceedings. The minister’s capacity for surprise seemed exhausted by the afternoons events. Without giving any indication that the presence of a man on a ladder was unusual in the least, with a silent tilt of his head, he invited him to come down and participate. The Man with the Ladder refused, but acknowledged the request by moving down one step on the ladder closer to the funeral.
“To us the Lord gives and from us he takes,” the minister began.
The old couple, who had stood up, nodded.
“The Lord gives to us and the Lord takes from us,” he intoned. They nodded again.
The minister looked up into the sky and repeated. “We are given to by the Lord and from us is taken by the Lord.” He stopped and sank into silence, perplexed to find himself caught by this fact as if it were a moral fly paper at the center of a spiritual maze. The old couple looked at one another and smiled wearily.
The Man with the Ladder took the moment afforded by the minister’s confusion to survey the other funeral across the hill. It was a very large funeral with a great many mourners. They had gathered in an expansive circle around the crimson-faced preacher who was whirling his arms around searching for a posture. The crowd leaned forward as the preachers robe swirled around him and he thrust his hands up vertically.
Below the Man with the Ladder the grave digger moaned quietly. He stood up and moved jerkily to the side of the grave but his exhaustion had crippled him, and he sank abruptly on the pile of dirt that had been removed from the grave and started sifting through it, pulling out stones and making a pile of them. He stopped almost as quickly as he had begun and separated his legs and gave himself two quick long scratches. “Here,” he said, surveying the cemetery with a coarse sweep of his head, “here he seems to take away more than he gives.”
“The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away,” the minister shot out, as if the appropriate place on a map of constant moralities had been pointed out to him. “Blessed be the name of the Lord” he said. He smoothed down his robes and began the service.
The grave digger shifted like an unbalanced sack of potatoes trying to find an equilibrium. He moaned again softly.
“We have come,” the minister continued, “to pay our last respects and accompany to her eternal rest, this woman …”
The words had a settling effect on the Man with the Ladder. It was the first indication that the person they were burying was a woman. He began to recognize what kind of grief and loss he was expected to feel and his sense of disorientation started to clear.
The minister twisted and reached inside his robe for the cards on which he had written out the history of the deceased and the details of the eulogy, but the hem of his cassock snapped at them before his fingers could grasp them, and, like a startled flock of birds, they leaped angrily to the breeze and floated in a gentle cascade toward the hole in the ground.
The grave digger lifted his head and watched the flight of words disappear into the grave. He shook himself and without uttering a sound, scrambled head first into the grave after them.
The loss of the cards agitated the minister who, without acknowledging the grave digger’s unexpected behavior, kneeled, as if kneeling were called for at this place in the ritual, and discretely tried to gather the cards which had landed outside of the grave.
One card, the one with the name of the deceased printed in large block letters, tottered on the edge of the open grave. As the minister reached for it, it anticipated its namesake and plunged into the pit.
The minister shook his head and spoke from the kneel. “We have come to pay our respects. We mourn our loss.” He tried to remember the name on the card. Evelyn came to mind but he recalled it was the name of his dead wife. He decided that the dead woman’s name was something like Veronica. “We have come,” he began again “to pay our last respects to Monique, a woman of uncommon virtue in a world of uncommon vice.”
“The Bible says ‘Death is ready at the instant.’ It comes unbidden and uncalled. ‘Ready or not it cries.’ Death cometh unto all things in and out of their season. We cannot ask why are we called. We are like children who have spent the afternoon playing in the fields. When our parents call, we plead for more time. It is the extra minutes that we savor the most. Unfortunately, the Lord is a strict parent.”
“A very strict parent,” the grave digger echoed from the gloom of the grave, “a real tyrant.” The darkness and solitude permitted him to take liberties. “I never can figure out what the old man wants. It’s black as a closet in here,” the voice from the pit complained. His hand appeared from the depth of the hole and deposited a card on the edge of the grave.
The minister tried to ignore the unusual activity. “We mourn and have come to pay our respects. But how?” He leaned over the grave. It was unclear if he was checking the progress of the grave digger or trying to see if the card with the name of the deceased was lying face up or face down, but the grave really was as dark as the inside of a closet.
“How can we pay our respects?” he asked again. “Can we praise?”
The Man with the Ladder thought he knew the answer.
“The Bible says, ‘As tatters is the praise of men.’ Can we extol?”
The Man with the Ladder was sure we could not.
“The Bible says ‘As chaff is the honor of men.’ Can we forgive?”
The Man with the Ladder was sure the Bible was down on forgiveness in these circumstances.
“As dust is our forgiveness. What can we do then to pay our respects? We can remember and our remembrance will express our love and our respect.”
The Man with the Ladder liked the idea. Unfortunately he was fairly certain he had not known the woman they were seeing off. As a wind came rushing up the hill he looked over the divide at the other ceremony. There, the robe of the preacher, who was enveloped in a large circle of mourners, billowed out. He felt the same wind rushing around him, yet just below him the minister’s robe clung to his body as if the wind was water that doused him. He looked thin and frail.
The minister blushed as he raised his head. “She touched many and many touched her.” His voice had faded into the silence of the cemetery and he sounded as if he were speaking from a great distance. “All those who knew …” he struggled for her name again and Lois came to him, “Lois, loved her.” He lifted his head. The Man with the Ladder thought he looked like a rooster and the next sentence came out a rooster’s joyous, triumphant crowing. “She was a woman of lightness.”
Lightness.
The Man with the Ladder’s attention had been distracted momentarily by a bird which was moving in one of the trees that shaded the mausoleum. It was high up, and, from below it looked to him like a falcon or a hawk, although he was sure it was a pigeon. Preening itself, it pulled loose a feather that drifted down toward him.
His attention locked onto the feather like radar tracking an
incoming missile. He tried to force himself to remember the woman but the only
memories that came to him were of his mother just before she died, and his
wife, waving goodby as she gaily left him for another man and
The feather danced in the air. Sometimes it seemed to follow the breeze and sometimes it seemed to lead it. It hovered over the heads of the mourners then floated up above the mausoleum. Suddenly without warning, it plummeted down skipping in front of the freshly polished brass molding. The sunlight leapt from the golden surface and smashed like a diamond against his eyes. He slammed his lids shut but the light knifed though and jammed his mind with freshly minted memories.
He was coming home from a job. He was not sure which one. He vaguely recalled work stacking boxes but he decided it was a stint changing light bulbs. He had had a lot of part time situations about the time he met her. He worked a janitorial circuit. He had met a maintenance man who sub-contracted out the light bulb changing part of his job. He paid the Man with the Ladder half of his hourly wage to change light bulbs so he could nap. Through this custodial engineer he had met many custodial engineers who all saw balancing on a ladder as the worst part of their job and were willing to sub-contract out that part of their work to him for half of their hourly wage—and sleep.
He remembered it as an afternoon that felt like a morning, a day when sunlight was everywhere and it seemed like every surface was a silvered mirror. He remembered he had been standing at a street corner with his ladder pressed tightly against his back when someone ran into both of them, ladder first. He remembered first seeing the collision around the ladder so that the moving figure and the edge of the ladder blended into one profile. He remembered he felt it was his fault and a little guilty.
Only that morning he discovered that, contrary to weather reports, the city did not have a single weather pattern, but was a mosaic of different miniature weather systems. Going to work he had noticed one place not far from his home, where a stand of buildings captured the wind so completely that, while for blocks around the breeze was lifting skirts and kidnapping hats, in this particular little space there was a eerie calm. There were other locations, like the corner where he remembered standing that afternoon, where the backside of one building slid into the front of another and shanghaied a stream of air, which a marquis of a third shredded, and a clump of garbage cans bent and twisted, to create a little hurricane zone.
He remembered he stood there through three changes of the light, his ladder tilted slightly and clasped closely against his back, watching the miniature tornado vault and turn. The amazing thing to him was that, although discarded newspapers and gum wrappers littered the ground, they stayed put as if they were pasted down. The miniature cyclone embraced only a single dancing feather. He watched in amazement as the feather soared and dived.
He met her voice first, hurt and surprised. Her voice said, “It hit me. Why did it hit me? I was watching …” She seemed embarrassed to confess she was looking somewhere else than where she was walking, “I was looking at that little … ”
“Tornado.”
“…when it hit me.”
“You ran into it,” the Man with the Ladder said, as he set the ladder down and jerked it open so that he would not have to support it. He immediately began to worry that this was the beginning of a long lawsuit in which he and the ladder would be on trial for assault and the stakes would be millions in damages.
“It assaulted me,” she insisted again, rubbing her head. Her voice was soaked with surprise at the ladder being where no ladder had a right to be.
“It did no such thing. You weren’t watching where you were going and you ran into it,” he argued. He began to prod his own anger, conjuring up in his mind the interrogation by the shyster lawyer she had hired in her damage suit against him and the ladder for two million dollars in phoney medical costs and psychological damage. It was a silliness. The woman had run into the ladder because she was not looking where she was walking. If the ladder had not been there she would run into him, certainly pushing him into the path of a speeding car. He strengthened his refutation by conjuring up his own devastating injury at the hand of the speeding car into whose path she had negligently shoved him.
“To blame the ladder is silly,” he commented caustically. “It wasn’t doing anything. It was resting. You flew into it not watching where you were going. You assaulted it.”
“I did not,” the woman whispered softly, rubbing her head. He had the sudden urge to kiss her where she was bruised but resisted the impulse by conjuring up the prospect of additional criminal charges and a supplementary claim for civil damages for sexual harassment. The situation was turning sour and getting out of hand. Emotions were being turned on and switched and rerouted and he was becoming thoroughly confused.
She pouted. “I did not,” she said again, and began to cry softly, the pain of the bruise, rising and displacing the surprise.
“I’m sorry,” the Man with the Ladder said, pushing the ladder to the side. “Does it hurt? I apologize for the ladder. It…” He stopped.
“It stings a little that’s all,” the woman said recovering quickly. She rubbed her face and the Man with the Ladder smothered his impulse to rub it with her. “It shattered my face,” she pouted. “Does it do that often?”
“Does it do what often?” the Man with the Ladder asked, thinking that issue of who had assaulted what had been disposed of.
“Run into people,” the woman said with half a smile. “It had no right to attack me while my back was turned. It ambushed me. Where’s my book?” she asked suddenly.
“It’s a ladder,” the Man with the Ladder answered. “It was resting on my back,” he said. “What book?”
The woman had bent over and was looking under the nearest parked car. “It’s thick and has a green cover. The Man with the Ladder dropped down beside her and shoved his head under the car.
“Oh,” she answered, “I remember. I left it home.” She stood up. The Man with the Ladder unbent himself and smashed his head into a mirror that projected from the door of the car. He groaned as he stood up. “Does it hurt?” the woman asked as he stood rubbing his head. She leaned over and kissed the spot.
The Man with the Ladder was breathless trying to follow her turns. He had been working himself into an apologetic, empathetic mood when the woman changed feeling on him again; then, as he whirled his emotions around, she stopped short and he had to rein them in and start them out in another direction. The pain in his head confused him more.
“Can I sit on the ladder?” the woman asked suddenly veering sharply away from books. She rubbed the side of her head with the tip of her finger.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said, thinking of torts and insurance.
“It’s nothing” she said.
“No. I don’t think so,” he replied, remembering some television court program where the judge took away the poor defendant’s house, his business, his wife, his children and his good name and gave them to the plaintiff because the defendant had been foolish enough to let his former friend hold his dog while he lit a cigarette.
She scampered up the ladder before he could stop her. It was the very first time he could remember anyone but him had sat on the ladder, at least on the highest step.
“If you don’t get down I will call a cop,” he said sternly. He noticed that the light had turned green and a few pedestrians were watching them instead of crossing the street, although the light ordering them to WALK was flashing furiously.
“It banged into me,”the woman sang out gaily. “The least it can do is support me for a while, while I recover.”
Even though its premise was incorrect, the logic of this argument appealed to the Man with the Ladder. “At least move down a step,” he said, as if, for an injured person, the top of the ladder were too heady a position from which to look out at the world.
He stared at her. She was petite. Her features were small and her brown hair tossed on her head casually. As he looked, her face emerged from the fog of fantasied court cases and damage suits. She was beautiful. Not a model-on-the-cover-of-a-magazine kind of beautiful, but a personal beautiful that wormed itself into his head and spoke to everything that recognized beauty in him.
“Would you like a cup of coffee and a croissant,” he blurted out.
She looked at her wrist which was resting lightly on the ladder. The place where a watch might have been showed a desert like stretch of fine hairs.
“Do you know what time it is?” she asked.
“It’s
“I’ve got to go, then” she said, scampering down the ladder at what he thought was a breakneck speed and swirling away from him.
“Good bye. It was nice meeting you. And your ladder is nice when you get to know it.”
He watched her flick a look at the light and bolt across the intersection. He was fascinated by her motions. He saw her arrive safely at the other side and whirl again and fling herself back across the street. She arrived breathless. “You look like some crazy jogger,” he said, bubbling that she had returned to him even momentarily.
“Tomorrow. I get off work at
When she got to the other side she turned her head over her shoulder and yelled at him. “I’m a married lady, you know.”
He heaved the ladder on his back carefully and turned into the traffic. He walked for a while and noticed his ladder seemed to slip and weave on his back as if it could not find its normal balance. Twice it almost twisted out of his grasp. He set it down and growled at it, but it ignored him dumbly.
Her image was receding from him like a wave pulling itself back into the ocean. He closed his eyes for a moment trying to remember her face and voice again. When he opened his eyes the minister had turned to the old couple and was repeating softly, “she was a women of lightness.”
The feather disappeared into the grave out of which came what seemed like an coarse echo of the ministers words, “she was a women of lightness. The word ‘lightness’ sounded as if it were some kind of a curse.
The grunting startled the minister who seemed to have forgotten about the grave digger in the grave. The interruption disorganized his flow of thought and he grappled again with the task of reconstructing the woman they were burying. “She, she,” he struggled to bring her spirit to the grave site where her body rested. The Man with the Ladder used the hesitation to move down another rung on the ladder where, for some reason he could not comprehend, he seemed to feel more comfortable.
The minister tried to regain his footing by repeating his earlier claim. “She was a woman of lightness,” adding, “everyone who met her loved her.”
The Man with the Ladder looked around searching for a someone in the present to anchor and give weight to the word lightness. He glanced at the old woman who was leaning on the old man by the open grave, but she did not seem to fit the picture the minister was painting. It was true, he thought, she was light, but it was because she was old and frail and the weight of living had drained from her. But that was not the kind of lightness he knew the minister was talking about. His eyes drifted to the funeral going on the next knoll. The crowd had grown since last he looked. It seemed to cover the crown of the hill like a blanket of thickets. The people had spaced themselves out in a very orderly and regular way so that each individual or family or business group stood out as a distinct fragment. The Man with the Ladder knew they had taken the positions they had occupied in the hierarchy of the dead man’s life, the most important and powerful in the front, the least consequential in the rear. Only in the back had people crowded together straining to glimpse the elegant preacher who had found his rhythm and had begun the burial service in earnest.
The Man with the Ladder searched through the crowd looking for a model of a woman of lightness. He inventoried what seemed like the entire assembly but the only person he found who fit the description well was a young girl of eight or nine, who stood quietly holding her mother’s hand. But she was not quite a woman yet. His mind glided back to the funeral before him. The minister had decided to rest for a moment.
Loosened from the constraints of listening, the Man with the Ladder thought about the bird in the tree. He looked for it in the higher branches. When he spotted it, it took off and floated down in intricate loops to rest on the mausoleum roof.
He reminded himself to avoid the reflection of the sun on the brass band and he shifted a little to watch the bird. It was an ordinary pigeon he thought. But when he looked further he was not quite sure it was a pigeon at all. One leg seemed shorter than the other and its feathers were darker and shinier than any pigeon he could remember seeing. As he watched it, the creature bent over and rubbed its beak against its shorter foot then lifted his head and stared at him. For some reason the birds glare unnerved him. He closed his eyes and as he heard the preacher cough and begin again repeating the phrase he had been disrupted at.
“All those who knew her loved her,” he intoned. “She was a woman of lightness, she was a woman of valor.”
Against the Man with the Ladder’s closed lids a woman of lightness and valor appeared.
She was exactly on time.
He spied her the minute she darted out of the flower shop into the crowd, a hummingbird diving into a flock of pelicans. As she saw him she veered in his direction. “I’m famished,” was the first thing she said to him, taking exaggerated, hopping steps up the ladder which he set out by his side. “My name is… they call me….” She stopped. “What’s your name?” she asked instead of giving him hers.
“They call me…” he stopped, feeling the appellation might be misunderstood. He searched out the name his parents had used.
“I’ll call you Ladder,” she chirped.
Before he could come up with something to call her she stood up and started down the rungs. “I’m married,” she said, apropos nothing at all, and with a finality that marked it as a terminal condition. The Man with the Ladder tried to figure out why she was reminding him of her marital state. At first he thought that it meant that the thought of sex should not ever enter his mind; but then he realized it was to mark another kind of boundary and that she was talking more to herself than to him. “I’ll eat anywhere.” She derailed his train of thought before he could bring it to the station.
The Man with the Ladder was about to propose a Chinese restaurant that he knew but she inserted herself in front of his words. “Lets buy something and eat on the grass.”
“Where?” was all he got out.
“There’s a deli, there,” she pointed behind him, “and I know a little park around there—she curled her arm to indicate the direction—that has a little plot of grass that is hidden from view and hardly anyone ever uses.”
He lifted the ladder and caught up to her as she made for the deli. She left him standing in front of the door of the store as he struggled with the ladder which suddenly seemed to have a mind of its own. He watched her tearing here and there like a dervish, to pick up a squat loaf of yellow portuguese bread, a few links of dried sausage, some meat concoction bulging out of its translucent skin, cookies and bottled water. He had gotten no further than a glowering stare from the woman behind the counter when he asked if he could leave the ladder by the door, when she slipped in front of him and dumped the collection of food on the counter. She counted out the amount as he was struggling with his wallet. “I’ll pay this time and you can take us to a proper place to eat next time.”
“Do you have a knife?” she asked, as she led him to the grassy plot hidden behind an empty children’s park.
He shook his head.
“I have one,” she said, “but it embarrasses me.” She removed a bulky electricians knife from her pocket book. “It’s so indelicate,” she said, slicing the pepper pocked sausage. She cut thick slices of bread and used a second blade to spread the mysterious meat concoction over them.
“Do you say a prayer before you eat?” she asked. She grew silent for a moment moving her lips quietly then exploded in a froth of eating. “I’m not from the city,” she said between bites.
He wanted to tell her that there was no way he could have mistaken her for someone from the city. The only question in his mind was ‘Was she from this planet?’ He took more pleasure than he thought right from watching her eat. She moved the food around in her mouth tasting different pieces, as if distinct parts of the same slice of meat in different places might taste entirely different.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“You’re not eating,” she said by way of a reply.
He had stopped eating because chewing distracted from the pleasure of watching her eat.
“
“I’ve never seen someone make an olive cheese sandwich before,” he commented.
“
“It is a long way away,” he commented.
“Not as far as
“No argument,” he conceded popping an olive into his mouth.
“I was born in
He admitted he was not.
He braced himself for the horror story he knew was coming. While
she chewed, he tried to figure out how he knew that the story of her childhood
was going to be sad and painful. At first he thought it might be the olives,
but he rejected that notion. It was something in her voice, something about the
way she said
“I mean, I wasn’t born an orphan. My father was a doctor in a
small town in
The Man with the Ladder realized that she was not going to expose horrors only intimate where they were concealed. As she paused to chomp on the olive cheese sandwich he tried to decide whether, without the horrors, she would have been fully angelic or whether she had developed her lightness only by being forced to discard all of the debris that growing up weighs human beings down with, because, to have clung to even a single piece would have caused her to sink into life as if it were quicksand.
Something inside the Man with the Ladder tugged at him and told
him to look away, not to look at her face, but like
“Spring in
The Man with the Ladder turned his head and looked at the
skyscrapers looming over the fence that bounded the park. “
“I’m not sure what I had in mind when I accepted his offer. I did not think about it, I just took it. I was different then, although if I were there today, you know I might do it again.” She looked at him to see if he disapproved but he chewed his olives and cheese intently. “When we got to NewYork, I moved in with him. After a month he suggested we get married. I wasn’t thinking then either. He was away a lot—he led a very irregular life—but I didn’t have a lot to compare it to. He drank a lot but I could see he was trying to be good to me.
“He was working on a book and an application for some poet in residence position that required submitting a series of poems. He was glad to have me around. ‘Marriage projected an image of stability,’ he said, although I think there was more to it than that. He tried really, but he began to drink steadily. He said he was having trouble with the book but it was more. He taught me how to type and when he was home and sober he read to me—his stuff and other poets he liked. I began typing his poems and making little corrections. He had been a very good poet once but he was slipping. At first I couldn’t do more than mimic his style but I was good at it. Then, as I began to appreciate what he was doing, I got to be able to fill bigger gaps. He started to resent me. Things turned bad when I got pregnant.”
The Man with the Ladder looked around at the playground. There were no children to be seen. He looked at her face and was sure he saw no child there either. He braced himself for more trouble.
“Something seemed to collapse in him. He began to hit me. I found out that he had a lover, a man who he had passed off as a graduate student working for him and he had a mistress in the city.
“The baby did not live a long time. He was away when it was born and he was away when it died. I… I…. What time is it?” she whispered.
“Its only a little after 5.”
“After that I got this job at the flower shop and started school.”
“When was that?” the Man with the Ladder asked weakly.
She did not seem to hear him. “What time is it?” she asked again.
“A few minutes after 5.”
He watched her reach inside of her self and rearrange
thoughts and feelings, set them down and remind them of their place. “
“What kind of school are you going to?”
She blushed and started chewing again. “It’s ….” She slurred a few words.
The Man with the Ladder laughed. “Oh,” he made twisty running, slurping sounds. The woman’s face lit up and she laughed.
“Computer programming and repair school. It’s a two year program. Somehow I thought it would be interesting.” A piece of cheese caught in the Man with the Ladder’s throat and he coughed. She did not look to him like a computer person, whatever a computer person looked like.
“I… It’s different. Not me really. I like to explore new things. I’m not very adventuresome really. But inside of me there’s a wanting to know things.”
He knew exactly what she meant.
“When I was thinking of going to school I looked for the subject that was furthest from me, most unlike me. That’s what school is for,” she said definitively. “It turned out to be computers. They are very alien. What time is it?” she asked again suddenly. “I can’t be late for class. It takes me a long time, a long time to get used to the machines. Even now. I …. I think a person needs a challenge. Do you know how fast the clock goes in a ordinary run of the mill computer, the kind dentists use to keep track of appointments and bills. She tilted her head like a bird, waiting for him to answer.
“I have no idea,” he said, glancing at his ladder set up on an isolated, grassy spot next to them. It looked alone, abandoned and out of time. He had taken to wearing a watch only so that he would be sure to be on time to meet her. At some point in the past, time had become a foreign concept to him and he continually struggled to connect the position of the hands on the dial of a watch with hours and minutes of time with her.
“It runs at, oh, maybe four or five million ticks a second. Can you imagine that?”
He could not. “Why would anyone use a clock that went so fast?
“Not anyone, anything—a computer. It
needs that kind of time to be able to add. It has to add a lot of times to do
even simple things like spell. Sometimes life seems to run on computer time.
Maybe parts of us live and die at a million clock ticks each second, did you
ever think of that? Maybe love moves in computer time. I’ve got to go now,” she
said suddenly, not giving him even a computer tick to protest. “I can’t be
late. You should stay here. It’s so wonderful in the afternoon, the park and
the trees—like
“There’s no reason for me to stay,” he thought to himself but he said, “I’ll watch you from the ladder.” He did not want her to go but she did not give him any hint that she wanted him to ask her to stay. “Can I see you tomorrow?”
She turned. “I’m a married woman,” she reminded him, “but ….”
Her face registered something between anger at her fate, humiliation at her desires and pleasure at his interest. “After work. After work you can take me to a restaurant, a real restaurant.”
“I don’t know your name,” he complained at her as she turned. She swung back towards him. “You can call me ‘Violet.’ It’s not my real name, but I love the flower.” He climbed on the ladder and watched her wind her way through the children’s playground. He squinted to avoid the sun, following her figure weaving its way through the park until he lost her in the branches of the trees that rapidly came between them. He shut his eyes and recreated her on the insides of his lids.
When he opened his eyes the minister was resting, leaning shakily on the air. He had positioned his feet as two legs of a tripod and was struggling to find a third leg. The grave digger seemed to be thrashing in the hole in front of him. The old couple rested delicately on their limb.
He glanced across the hill. Compared with the funeral he was attending, the funeral there had progressed much further. The preacher had grown more demonstrative and agitated. The order imposed by life had dissolved and been replaced with a disorder mimicking death. The mourners had pressed closer and become a matted thicket of bodies.
He could not make out just what the minster at the sister funeral was saying. By the collective sagging of the crowd it seemed to him that the minister had pushed past the virtuous, active life of the banker and was bringing the crowd to the deceased’s untimely death. He could not tell how he knew that the dead person being interred on the other hill was a banker, nor how he knew his death was sudden and untimely, but he knew it as certainly as he knew his ladder was made of oak. As he watched the periphery of the throng pull itself forward and tuck itself into the drama unfolding at the center, he saw the little girl who he had taken as a model of a woman of lightness detach herself from her distracted mother, duck under the contorted, splayed legs and taut arms of the mourners, rigid in reverence and respect at the spectacle the preacher was presenting to them, and braid her way in the direction opposite the nap of the crowd.
The little girl captured his attention. He tried to study her face to tell something about her, but at the distance her features were blurred. He watched as she meandered down the hill on which the sister funeral was taking place. She seemed to be looking at him although he dismissed the notion as his fantasy. He followed her as she wandered along the avenue at the foot of the hill on which he was perched and turned up the road to where he, the minister, the grave digger and the old couple were burying an unknown woman of lightness.
His attention was yanked back to the grave site immediately in front of him. The minister had ended his rest. He took a deep breath preparing to resume the service. Unfortunately the volume of air was more than he could handle and he began to cough, producing an wrenching series of accelerating wheezes. Each heaving spasm left him weaker than before until the cumulative effect rendered him helpless. He sank down to the grass, his limbs slipping and sliding over one another, likes frogs in a gunny sack. He clung to the ground breathless. The coughing brought the grave digger out of the grave. A hand holding a hip flask emerged first. It waved in front of the minister’s face. He took it gratefully. The old couple squirmed as the rest of the grave digger emerged, again covered with dirt and sweat. The old couple tensed on their limb then relaxed as the minister settled on the ground and rested. The Man with the Ladder sat back also, taking the occasion as a natural break in the proceeding. He turned to search for the pigeon whose feather had carried him into the never never land of the of the woman they were burying, when he heard a rumbling.
The grave digger was pulling himself close to the minister. He took the flask that the minister returned to him. Instead of sliding back to his depression in the ground, the grave digger hesitated for a moment then grunted something the Man with the Ladder could not quite hear. He accompanied his whispered speech to the minister with a series of gross gestures. The minister nodded and the grave digger stood up, assumed the ministers place at the head of the grave site and began to sermonize roughly.
“All women are brave. They have to put up with us, huh.” He looked at the Man with the Ladder. “They have to give birth to us, they have to put up with our confusions. But…,” he sighed a long wavering sigh, “they don’t want to any more. They want freedom.”
He spat the word out. “To dig graves maybe, to play in the dirt. Some freedom. But they’ve earned the right to suffer it. Was it worse than the unfreedom they had. No different!” he pronounced, answering his own question. “They suffer. All women are brave. We didn’t want to take away their freedom. Well, maybe a little, to keep our freedom to run away, not to be tied down. Because … because,” he was searching for something to legitimate men’s oppression “because we need them more, more than they need us. To run away, our freedom to run away.”
The old woman looked at the old man and frowned.
The idea aroused the grave digger. “We held them hostage. Huh. To run home to. We needed that, we sure did. Cause we didn’t ask to be born, none of us. And then they nag us. They make us fight them. They wait and ambush us, they provoke us. Women are honorable and feel things but… “ He peered into the grave. “There’s a dark side to sensitivity. It’s their curse. They have to live in that shadowy half of intimacy too.”
“Is there a difference between men and women?” he asked. The Man with the Ladder knew that it was a rhetorical question although he actually thought of raising his hand or doing something else to catch the grave digger’s attention to say that he had some idea about the difference. The grave digger looked up at him and blinked. “Are they different from us?” he asked again. “Yes, they are soft. They are soft, and they have feelings,” he repeated.
“And men bossed them or thought they did, and women use it against us even if it isn’t true or wasn’t. And the world changed.” He glared at the old lady. “We had a deal, didn’t we. Now they blame us, they make us bear the responsibility. But it was a deal, two partners. No one asked us. We were suckered too. Now the world changed. They think its coming their way, They think it’s because they wanted to be free and they had justice on their side, and it’s right so they won but …?” He looked at the grave. “It’s because the world changed. And what we think is them coming to the top is just them getting a different set of chains like ours. Cause we kept them free in a way, free of ….” His voice drifted off.
“Now they want to be unfree the way we are unfree and who can we run home to and who can they run home to. Everyone is homeless. We can run home, here. That’s the only home we will have to run to or from. Since she was a woman like my mother, she was a woman of valor, a woman of honor.” He fell down abruptly and half pulled half pushed himself to the place where he had been sitting.
His words ricocheted around the Man with the Ladder’s head. He shut his eyes and kept very still hoping the torrent of words would calm down. When the calm returned and he opened his eyes again she was standing by the ladder.
They had fallen in love.
They fell in love the way two strangers, tourists, sightseeing in a foreign country, intending to spend the day visiting monuments and art museums take a wrong turn and find themselves together in a part of some exotic city that does not appear on maps, a section from which no avenue exits but all streets curve in on one another and bring them back again and again to a strange and magical place in which they are held prisoner by their own desire and the ominous and inexplicable sense that they have found an unknown half of themselves and come home.
When they realized they were in love they fled from one another. But they could not stay apart. It was more difficult for her he knew. But he could not bring himself to sacrifice his love because it caused her pain. It was the kind of love that came so swiftly and naturally that there no escape from it. “You didn’t want it,” he told himself. “You certainly didn’t intend it and you certainly weren’t prepared for it. It just happened. And while it was happening, it seemed like it was happening to someone else and you just woke up and found the someone else was you.”
They tried hard to talk each other out of being in love. She had read a lot of stories and a number of books about falling in love, she told him once. In these works of fiction, falling in love always occurred with palpitations and flushes, unnaturally, as a disturbance with a lot of explicit and obvious signs like placards on which were printed in block letter, ‘LOVE’ or ‘ROMANCE’.
But, she complained, “when I fell in love with you none of the symptoms happened. I was looking for them. I really was. I agreed with myself that if I saw even just one I would stop seeing you. But none of them happened. It was just a simple fact that one minute I was not in love and the next I was. And I’m a married woman,” she whimpered.
Each time they met after they realized they were in love, she reminded him and herself that she was a married woman. After a while, he answered the reminder with a reminder of his own that the marriage was in name only, phoney, false, deceitful and dishonest. “What difference does it make that you’re married,” he argued. “It’s not a marriage really. He’s never there for you,” he argued, “he has …” He stopped when he saw the pain on her face.
“I took a vow, I swore,” she replied. “I swore to God,” she added.
“Are you religious?” he asked.
“No, but I swore. I would be as bound by an oath I took in … in …” She tried to think of the most foreign language she could think of. “… in Cobol. Once you swear, once you bind yourself it doesn’t make any difference whether that thing you bound yourself to changes from good to bad. You swore to be loyal and faithful. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is worth being faithful to or not.”
“This is the last decade of the 20th century,” he insisted. “The divorce rate is higher than the stock market and …. Marriage doesn’t mean that anymore.” He said it, but without conviction, not sure exactly what marriage did mean. He had exactly the same idea of taking an oath.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said sadly.
“But there’s no marriage,” he repeated. “You’re married in name.
He has …” He wasn’t sure whether he should bring up her husband’s mistress or
his boyfriend. Although she had unemotionally told him about the woman her
husband kept in the city, and the boyfriend he had on
“I know,” she said. “But that’s him. It doesn’t change my end of the bargain, what I said, what I vowed.”
“That’s so primitive, so
“If you can’t take it any more, I mean being in love with me and not… then I’ll understand,” she said. “Its hard for me too, “ she added. “It’s been so long … I….”
He turned away from her.
Very late one afternoon, absolutely alone in the park where they had made a ritual of eating on the grass, she asked him, boldly for her, why he loved her. He knew that he was being tested, that there were some answers that would mark his love as genuine and others that would stamp it as shallow and superficial. Even though he knew it was a test he did not hesitate. “I love you because you are a woman of lightness and because you’re so filled with contradictions and because you’re studying to be a computer programmer and repair person and you’re the opposite of computers and because you keep your word and because you’re a little bit of Kansas and ….”
She stopped him. “Enough, enough,” she giggled, pleased at the list of qualities he had come up with. “Do you want to know why I love you,” she asked. He hesitated before answering yes because he had never thought of why she loved him, and he was afraid she might love him for the wrong reasons.
“I love you because of the ladder,” she said, “because of how you sit between heaven and earth a little more between than most people, because you’re not quite here but not definitely there and because you don’t know things that you’re certain of, and see things that aren’t quite there but are there really.”
“What does that mean?” he insisted on knowing, even though he knew quite well what she meant.
“I don’t know,” she giggled, drawing her mouth into a little round
circle. “You face North but you see South. You’ve lost
the modern smarts and contemporary desires. Because, because you’re from
He felt the passion rising in him, hammering his perceptions and feelings. He fought it because he thought it would frighten and repel her. But he felt her turning towards his excitement, felt her make a child like gesture to head him off then push it aside and face into his rising desire with the turbulence of her own rising passion.
They fell in a heap together and lost themselves in a passionate lovemaking that seemed to recapitulate the crazy quilt career of their relationship.
Afterwards there was a calm that he did not expect. He had anticipated that if they ever made love the ‘afterwards’ would be filled with recriminations, guilt and remorse, overwhelmed by some sense of transgression. Instead there was an intense calm, a taut rightness, a peacefulness, an ease that was not an absence of something but a fullness in its own right. He lay there a long time with her in his arms not thinking of anything but hearing a quiet voice like an echo far away repeating something to him that he could not quite make out and resisted paying attention to.
That day for the first time he invited her home to where he lived. Before this, they had spent all their time in public places. He had made excuses when he thought an excuse was necessary.
She thought that he was ashamed and embarrassed about where he lived and helped him avoid the issue. That afternoon, when he invited her home so that he could make a dinner for them, she tried to allay his anxiety. “I don’t think where a person lives makes a difference,” she said.
“ I hope you mean that,” he answered. But
it turned out he lived in a loft in
“I own it,” he said, when she asked how he could afford to live in such a place. “I bought it a long time ago when it was really cheap when I was doing something else—before the ladder. The rent is very low because the building owns the bottom floor. And I painted the pictures,” he said trying to head off more questions. She recognized he was embarrassed and examined the paintings and furniture without saying anything.
In the morning over coffee he raised the issue of her moving in. “Why don’t you move in. There’s no reason not too now. I love you,” he stammered, embarrassed that his proclamation did not come out more forcefully.
He watched her. She reached in herself to get hold of reasons to refuse but he saw that something had changed and that she could not find any. He watched her puzzlement change to surprise and then pleasure.
“Well, I would have to go home and tell, Peter.”
“Why couldn’t you just move in and drop him a postcard.” He was
not sure how serious the proposal was. “You could go home and get your stuff—he
was sure there was not much—when you know he won’t be there. You could leave
him a note he could read when he came back from
She looked at him reproachingly.
“OK,” he conceded. he was anxious but secretly glad she was clinging bravely to a way of doing things that left her whole and complete. After she left for computer school he found himself wandering around the loft aimlessly, floating in the vast pool of pleasure that seemed to fill the space but bumping into invisible obstructions that he could not identify. After a while he sat down feeling bruised and anxious. He closed his eyes and in his head her image seemed to float by and he could hear a voice repeating, “she was a woman of valor.”
He opened his eyes and realized it was the minister’s voice he was hearing. “She was a woman of valor,” he repeated, “an uncommon woman.”
The Man with the Ladder knew this. The minister smoothed down his robe and straightened himself up. The Man with the Ladder looked past the minister and saw the little girl who was making her way up the path to the grave site. She was picking flowers. Slowly, effortlessly, she was weaving her way through the sprinkling of graves selecting a blossom here, a bloom there. He glanced over at the funeral on the other hill. No one had noticed the little girls absence.
The grave digger shifted his position noisily. He was aimlessly sifting through the rocks in the pile of dirt. He seemed to be looking for something although it was not clear what. He selected a chunky, coarse stone that fit into his hand and held it dreamily against his cheek. The old couple had resolved themselves into proper mourners. Their cheeks glistened with tears and they leaned forward as the minister began his summation.
“Birth is a mystery,” he said. “Death makes that mystery manifest. There is no reason for either. Both are acts of grace.”
The Man with the Ladder shut his ears and refused to be comforted. Comfort is always small he thought, always bitter. Nothing was going to bring back the woman they were burying and he felt it proper to refuse to be comforted. The world was not made right. There was a defect at its core. He used to think it was that people would believe anything as long as you proved it to them. He felt that was a wondrously perverse characteristic. He glanced at the funeral on the other hill. The preacher had drawn the crowd up so that it pressed intimately as a single mass toward the casket. It’s not fair, the Man with the Ladder thought, that in death one person should have so many mourners and that another should have so few.
The minister continued enumerating the qualities of death. “We can not tell when death will call to us. It does not follow human logic or human imagination. It moves along a path which does not make sense at all.” The words tumbled out of his mouth naturally, but the message they composed startled him. He was struggling to say something which would draw a blanket of comfort over the small knot of people staring into the yawning grave. But instead of words of consolation suggesting that there was a hidden, ennobling meaning that had escaped them, he had produced words that snared and trapped, then unleashed the devastating human meaning of death.
He tried again. “Death is not constrained by the circumference of human desire nor deflected by the curves of human need.” Instead of comfort he came up with anger again. His frustration overwhelmed him. “Death is irrational,” he shrieked, “death is stochastic.” He spun on his feet and waited for more words to come. When none did, he decided the eulogy was over.
The words sprung out as a wild complaint. Although the Man with the Ladder could not immediately recall what stochastic meant he assumed it was just another way of saying death came when it was least expected and most unwelcome. The minister motioned to the grave digger who rose clumsily and worked the apparatus for lowering the coffin into the grave. The Man with the Ladder looked away.
The bird he took for a pigeon but which seemed more aristocratic than any pigeon he had seen found a roost on the tree opposite him nearly at the level of his eye. The bird lifted its long leg and rubbed its beak against the shorter one as if to draw attention to it. The Man with the Ladder tried to decipher the significance of the creature’s gesture but his eyes focused beyond it. He turned back to the minister and saw the little girl coming up behind him. Although her arms were nearly full of blossoms she had collected, she was still searching for flowers. She did not seem to be aiming for the grave site but her wandering seemed to draw her in that direction. He strained to see her face but it was hidden by the flowers. All he saw or thought he saw, was that she seemed to be singing or humming.
His attention returned to the bird again which seemed to be waiting for him to look at it. As soon as he rested his eyes on it, it rose without warning. A voice in his head cried out ‘don’t,’ but he could not follow its advice fast enough and he raised his eyes into the sun sinking in the western sky. He yanked his head away and when he reopened his eyes she was beside him again.
They had argued over nothing, a incitement to make up. She used the occasion to give him the gift she had been saving. “I think I’ll go over and pick up my things and say goodbye to Peter. His anger drained, replaced by some shadowy weight. “Would you come with me,” she asked, “to help carry my things. But wait for me on the next block because ….”
“Because you don’t want Peter to look out and see me.”
She nodded.
“Its silly, but there’s no point in hurting him the way he hurt you,” the Man with the Ladder added. He was jealous of the concern she was wasting on a man who had treated her badly.
“I know it’s ….” She started to cry.
“I’m sorry, you’re doing the right thing,” he said, but in his mind he wasn’t sure. They walked to ‘her house’ talking about a vacation and getting married. She struggled against the ideas, but only to let him convince her. The closer they got to the house the more the conversation broke up into sharply edged islands of speech surrounded by silence. “I’m nervous,” she said, in the middle of one of these silences. “I ….”
He tried to calm her down although he was as apprehensive as she was. He could not put his finger on what was making them nervous. What she was doing was honest enough and something she should have done a long time ago. Their relationship was firm enough to withstand the complaints and pleadings of a disaffected husband whose objections would only be perfunctory anyway. Yet something with a horrible mien, and waving a sign advising trouble, danced invisibly in front of them. He tried to remember the other times he had felt this way but they were buried too deep in his memory and he gave up. He knew only that he was happier than he had been in a very long time. And as far as he could tell, so was she.
When they had gotten a block from her house they stopped. He could see the house from where he stood. They had walked by it inadvertently one day and he noticed her shivering and asked her if she were cold and she told him it was because here was where she lived. They had avoided it afterward. It was a single family house set aside from the others in the block by large flowering trees. The road it sat on dipped sharply before it reached the house and rose in a broad arch afterward so it was as if the house rode in a saddle on the street. All he could think of was that when it rained the basement must have flooded and he wanted to ask her about it but it seemed a silly thought.
They started speaking together. “You …”
“I …” He took charge of the sentence. “I’ll wait here. When you come out we’ll take your stuff home and go out for coffee and croissants.” She thrust herself into his arms and kissed him. “I do love you,” she said. “I really do and …” He held her for a moment.
“I love you too,” he said. “You’re sure you don’t want me to …” He raised his shoulders then dropped them. “I’ll wait here,” he repeated. He felt abandoned. He sat down on a stoop and watched her walk up the street to the house. At one point she hesitated and he sprang to his feet ready to rush towards her, but she picked up her pace and he sat down again abruptly saying this was something that she had to do alone and that it was better for her to do it alone, but he was not really sure it was true. He tried to imagine their life together. It was a new beginning for both of them. In a month she was going to graduate computer programming and repair school. She looked forward to quitting her job at the florists and ‘getting into the iron.’
He had explored permanent jobs. Now that he felt he had responsibilities, he reached back into his past for credentials he had laid aside. He grasped them layer by layer and sought out a position first with the weakest of them, then, as the weaker did not produce what he thought of as the promise of an adequate income he reached for the stronger, later certificates, although they swung him in a direction he had once renounced forever. He watched her stop in front of the house momentarily then walk up the steps and disappear through the door. Anxiety first trickled into his head then cascaded in a torrent and flooded out reason and imagination. There was no reason to be anxious he told himself and struggled to give birth to some pleasant fantasy but his mind would not let go of the fear.
He felt empty and alone sitting on the stoop. He looked around and
tried to figure out what a debauched, depraved poet was doing living in such a
suburban setting. His mind shook free of that thought only to have it replaced
by the question of whether she and he might be better off living in a
neighborhood like this than in his loft in the south of
When he turned back to scanning the street for her, he noticed a bird. He couldn’t tell whether it had dropped from the sky or wobbled out to the street from one of the lawns. It seemed to be thrashing in the middle of the road. He watched as it raised itself up on one leg fluttered its wings and tumbled to the ground again. It was clear that flying was out of the question. He got up again from the stoop. He thought he would go and get it out of the middle of the street before a car came because there was no way a vehicle entering the street from above the house would see it.
As he started to move toward it, he reminded himself that if she came out of the house and saw him there she would feel he had broken a trust, that he felt she needed help to do something that she was incapable of doing herself or that he did not have faith in her. He sat down on the stoop again. The guilt he felt at leaving the bird exposed turned to relief when, after a minute—just about the time he would have reached the crippled bird—she came out of the house with a suitcase and a stuffed animal under her arm. He watched her dance down the steps, turn toward him then notice the bird. She walked into the middle of the street and he could feel her sympathy for the creature as she set the suitcase down. The image of the car shooting over the hill played itself in his consciousness in slow motion. He started to yell but the realization that it was too late strangled the cry.
He felt used, enraged at the car and at her willingness to carelessly sacrifice him and their life together for a injured bird. He watched the car push itself over the rise and lunge at the bending figure. He watched in an artificially slowed motion as the bird skittered on one leg and a wing toward the sidewalk and his beloved straightened up. He could not look and pulled his head away and shut his eyes. As he did so he heard a woman’s cry, a scream, a name, ‘Elyse’.
When he opened his eyes the noise and rush of people in the funeral on the other hill captured his attention. He realized the mother had discovered her child was missing and wailed her name reflexively. The name, carried by desperation and anguish seemed to fly straight to the grave in front of him. The crowd took a moment to realize what had happened and the taut cord of the preachers magical eulogy which had bound them into a single body snapped and the single, cohesive mass they made up, disintegrated. The outer edges spilled down the hill in a directionless pursuit. Someone on the edge of the plummeting crowd spotted the little girl standing directly behind the minister on the neighboring hill.
He heard voices cry out and saw many arms point. The crowd, now a shapeless amoeba, flowed down the hill across the avenue road and up the road. The minister had stopped speaking, turning instead to watch flood of people surging towards his ceremony. He waited silently for the bulk of the crowd to reform around him as the mother pushed her way through the mass. She grabbed the little girl roughly as the minister shushed the whispering mob.
“The funeral is nearly over,” he lectured. “Be respectful until we are finished.”
The Man with the Ladder moved down a few steps to be closer to the ritual. His eyes were filled with tears but there was a part of him that saw the crowd as an ultimate, unexpected but deserved homage to the woman they were burying. As he looked down to the grave his eyes met the eyes of the little girl.
She was humming. Her eyes were filled with tears but she seemed strong and serene. She peered into the grave and bent awkwardly down to let the flowers tumble in, then looked up at him again to tell him that a woman of lightness and valor did not simply disappear into the darkness of the grave without being mourned, without passing something to the living, something that would be carried on for at least one other generation.
The minister looked down at the coffin not quite fully encompassed by the grave. “We,” his gesture took in the enlarged group of mourners, “send to her eternal rest this woman of lightness and valor.” His voice was strong and did not hesitate, “Elyse.” May she rest in His eternal peace and may all those who knew and loved her be comforted. Amen.”
The Man with the Ladder sat on the ground beside the grave for a long time after the funeral was over and the crowd went away. He sat there even after grave digger rearranged the dirt over the coffin. He sat there even after the old couple who had lingered, went away. He thought he might continue polishing the marble but decided it could wait for another day.
The loft would be empty but he thought he remembered a corner on
One of the young girl’s flowers had escaped entombment. He picked it up and put it on grave. “Goodby, Elyse” he said. “Goodby.”
§
The Man with the Ladder was wandering in midtown one day when something called to him. Reminding himself that he had his ladder on his back, he prepared to swing around very carefully to see to whom, or to what, the voice belonged when he realized that he had felt rather than heard the words, which seemed to have avoided his ears and simply appeared in the middle of his head.
What he thought he heard was, “I am desirable, desire me,” but he wasn’t sure. It could have been “I am buyable, buy me,” or even “I am needable, need me.”
The first time this had happened to him, he felt queer and singular, but he had made inquiries discretely among the people he knew, and almost everyone had had the strange experience of being enticed by some Circe lurking in a store window or display case.
“In the city, every person is Ulysses,” his friend Reb Dunzel had reminded him.
He knew if he were very still the voice would try to lead him to the place from which it was calling him. It never was clear however, until the very last minute, what was sufficiently attracted to him to single him out from the millions of people in the city or at least the 25 or so in his immediate vicinity, none of whom showed any sign of hearing anything at all. The uncertainty of the object of desire, and of the outcome of the turned-on-its-head-hunt, was both exciting and scary.
For a while, he felt silly circling aimlessly like an orphaned and dispossessed homing pigeon. The voice seemed to be especially playful and mischievous, taking him through the front door of a number of stores with its voice clear and vibrant and abandoning him to silence in front of racks of vibrators or shelves of brassieres and drip dry underwear. After stringing him along for a while it finally took him through the doors of the main entrance of Macys.
He felt foolish just standing there, waiting for the voice to talk him up or down, or forward or back, while tourists and sophisticated ladies in sneakers swirled and eddied around him.
The most important thing in department stores he reminded himself, breaking the internal silence he maintained while waiting for the voice to signal him again, the most important thing is not to attract attention. He followed his own advice. He tried to be inconspicuous as he walked over to the information counter, which was not easy because he was in work clothes and carrying a ladder.
“I … I want something,” he stuttered. The young lady with the ribbon in her hair and a thin but eager smile was more than willing to help him find it.
“We all do, don’t we?” she remarked. “What is it that you’re looking for?”
“That’s looking for me,” the Man with the Ladder thought, but what he said out loud was “I don’t know exactly,” and he screwed up his inner ear trying to decipher the outline of the mysterious voice, still teasingly silent.
“Well could you describe it to me?” she inquired.
“Uh, Uh,” he stumbled. “It’s not very big,” Actually he was sure of that because the voice was strong but not large. “I can carry it,” he stated with absolute certainty. “It’s very lovely,” He just took for granted that it would be, although something in his head said quietly, ‘don’t be so sure.’ He felt better with these bits and pieces of a description, even though he knew they were fictional.
The girl in the information booth tired rapidly from trying to make a complete and coherent picture of an object of desire from the fragments of information he gave her.
“Yes, yes,” she said, impatiently, “but what does it do? What do you do to it? And what does it do for you?” she demanded to know in rapid fire order.
The man with the ladder stopped dead in the face of this onslaught of questions. Suddenly the only thing he wanted to do was escape into the anonymity of the stream of people around him who knew what they wanted and were heading straight for it; he suddenly realized that asking for information at an information booth was a confession of the worst sort of incompetence which justified almost any degree of impertinence by the person being queried.
“It just sits there,” he blurted out, “and you can eat it or wear it and it makes you feel good,” snatching the answers from the highest branch of his head without stopping to ask himself if they were ripe for picking.
“Seventh floor,” the girl manning the information booth said without blinking an eye and without the least idea of what he was talking about. “And sir,” she added, with a P.S. plated with gracious relief, “you’ll have to leave your ladder at the check in counter.”
As he left, the girl in the information booth shook her head solemnly. She had decided when she started this job at which she had been working for over a year and thought of as a career, that even though people were entitled to information merely because they waited in line in front of her for it, the job did not require that the information be accurate. She found that people were as satisfied with information of indifferent quality as they were with the facts.
“Next.”
As soon as he turned a corner and was out of her sight, he stopped and shut out the store’s noises and tried to tune in the object that was calling him. But all he got was a static of perfumes and jumble of feminine voices talking about pocketbooks and hats. He stood there for a while until he heard a deep male voice asking “Can I help you, sir?” It was a security guard.
The Man with the Ladder knew the rules, He knew that the worst thing that could happen to you in a department store was to attract attention, and the worst attention to draw was the attention of security, because no matter where you went, you were passed from one security person to another and watched like a hawk until you began to feel that they knew something about you that you yourself were unfortunately only just about to learn, and that you might, in fact, be ready to do something untoward, and you began to watch yourself— and that was the end of the joy of shopping.
“Where can I check my ladder?” the Man with the Ladder asked. The guard pointed straight ahead. “I’ll walk you there,” he added, and cleared a path between packed shoppers watching a demonstration of a combination ice cream maker and sausage stuffer.
With the security guard waiting patiently by his side, he exchanged his ladder for a blue ticket with the word “Ladder” printed on it. “What floor do you want?” the guard asked.
“Seven,” he heard himself say as naturally as the girl in the information booth had said seven, although he had no idea what was on seven and the voice, which had mentioned no particular floor, was as still as an empty box.
“I’ll walk you to the elevator,” the guard said pleasantly, relieved that it was going to be seven’s problem. As the elevator door closed the Man with the Ladder watched the guard moving to the little yellow telephone off to the side of the control panel.
The anticipation of having another security person stalk him over the terrain of the seventh floor depressed him so much that when the elevator stopped at six he followed the only other passenger out the door.
He wandered over the terrain of six until he felt he knew the floor’s inventory as well as any of the sales people, and then he took the stairs down to five and repeated his search, trying all of the time he was in motion, to capture the small voice that had conjured him to Macy’s. But it was quite still.
Almost helpless with frustration, he wandered up the stairs to seven. No sooner had he passed through the door of that floor than he heard the voice of the object of desire, calling him again, loud and clear. He followed it the way a boy might follow a cork bobbing in a clear stream, to the counter where it rested in a box of its own.
Once he saw it he wanted it. Not only did he want it, he wanted it terribly much. And, luckily for him, not only could he almost afford it, but he had a credit card, which would let him buy it whether he could afford it or not.
Odd, political thoughts always seemed to bubble up in his head at times like this. He struggled against them because, although they came in reds and whites and blues, they always seemed grotesque distortions of real patriotic feelings and, he thought, approached sedition at least from the backside.
For instance, as he was reaching for his wallet, his attention riveted on the spotlessly dressed but gangling and unusually thin clerk, the thought pushed into his mind that real democracy is the democracy of credit even for people whose brains go bump in the night; and the freedom that America had perfected through years of boom and bust, war and peace, good times and bad, was the freedom to buy what you wanted, for more than you could afford to pay, even if you didn’t need it: especially if you didn’t need it.
“I want that,” he said to the clerk, pointing to the object of his desire which rested naked in a box in a display cabinet, its voice alternating between a clear, bright trilling and gurgling, gently rolling rondoles.
“Yes sir,” the clerk responded a little too enthusiastically, “cash or charge?” The Man with the Ladder looked at him as if the question held some implicit slur. Having reached the object of his desire the Man with the Ladder was rapidly regaining his control over the rules, etiquette, protocol, and ritual of shopping of which the primordially preeminent was, ‘charge it, only the very poor pay cash.’
Like most people, the Man with the Ladder never felt like he really owned a purchase until he got it home and unwrapped it in the privacy of his own living room. It was that solitary act of stripping off the public wrapping that made the object his.
The return trip down the elevator and the subway ride home were a blur, fogged by a mixture of an anxiety that someone would rip the package out of his hands, and anticipation of a sustained rush of pure pleasure that he was sure the ritual of unwrapping his purchase would bring.
The closer he got to home the further his anticipation of enjoyment ran ahead of his anxiety, and by the time he reached his house he had to remind himself consciously to shut the door behind him, otherwise the dog would get out and there would be hell to pay.
At first he tore at the box with ineffective, trembling fingers. Then he calmed himself and tried to hold himself back and take as much pleasure as he could from unwrapping the box carefully and delicately. He took considerable pleasure from the exquisitely efficient movement with which he pared the wrapping from the wrapped. With measured, deliberate movements, he separated the bottom half of the box gently from the top half.
At the moment when his anticipation of pleasure peaked and all of him stood exposed and he tore down the sheer but impenetrable veil between his vulnerability and the object of his desire, a cruel, frozen flush of surprise and shock came out of nowhere and bit him on the nose. The thing he had anticipated would bring him wave after wave of deep heaving, pleasure had become invisible; the box was empty.
He was plunged instantly into the most abject depression. Not only did its invisibility make the object of desire incapable of satisfying the want it had aroused, but it was mute, although he thought that he could hear it humming. And then his anticipation and vulnerability to pleasure collapsed under the gravity of this new and odd physics into a dense, heavy fury.
He was furious at the invisible object and he was furious at Macys which he was sure would deny that the thing he had purchased had become invisible and would certainly accuse him of making up a preposterous story to advance a fraudulent claim on the store, and he was furious at himself for being so caught up by it that he had not used any consumer common sense at all. He knew all of the rules against impulse buying and he followed them religiously when purchasing something as small as a loaf of bread or a pastry. He was angry and his anger sucked in the bitterness of self blame.
He fantasied an alliance between the now invisible thing and the store, in which the latter made a neat profit by giving the thing the freedom to advertise itself directly to people’s heads and then, after it had enticed some poor soul to buy it, make itself invisible. When the poor innocent purchaser returned it, claiming it was invisible, the store would bemusedly and sarcastically counter with the claim that the buyer was delusional and offer to refund the individual the cost of the used, empty box.
He determined not to be taken in and began to nourish this
determination, feeding it fat details from a continuous stream of fantasies. He
closed the box carefully pulled the wrapping over it again, and set out for
Macys. The subway trip took double the time it usually required because the
train stopped mysteriously at
He anticipated a ferocious scene, and it was only the trains rumbling out of its stalled condition that stopped him from actually screaming at the gray haired old lady with spotted hands and thinning hair sitting opposite him whom he had chosen to play the part of the returns manager in his mind.
The trip from the subway station through the main doors of Macy’s, past the still smiling lady wedged into the information booth, up the stairs to the returns office took no time at all. A journey propelled by anger and compassed by bitterness takes no time to reach its destination, the Chinese say, only the return trip home is slow and painful.
He managed to blurt out only a small piece of his story to the woman who was stationed at the entrance to the returns office when she abruptly interrupted him. “Go down the hall,” she pointed with a piece of the sandwich she was eating, “and see Mr. Gratice. He handles this kind of thing.” The way she said, ‘this kind of thing’ made his nose run and a chill run down his spine.
“It’s invisible,” said the Man with the Ladder bursting into the office with Mr. Gratice’s name on the door, beginning story end backwards and nearly hurling the hastily rewrapped box down on the large spotless and empty polished top of the desk in the middle of the room. Like a wooden ocean it nearly swallowed the slight figure of the occupant of the office whose light blue suit and apricot scarf belied the seriousness and gravity of his position.
“It’s invisible,” he repeated and spilled out the entire tale without giving the man behind the desk a chance to interrupt him and leaving nothing out, although on hindsight he thought it would have been much better to have omitted the part about hearing it call to him.
When the story was completed the small man behind the large desk that the Man with the Ladder noticed had his name and the title ‘Manager of Other Things’ on it, said sincerely, “Of course, I understand completely. Could I look at it?” he asked.
“I assure you it’s as invisible as air,” the Man with the Ladder insisted as he opened the box. But it wasn’t. There it was in its full glory, as desirable as ever and calling to them both it seemed, loud and clear.
“But it was invisible before,” the Man with the Ladder protested, “at home it was.”
The manager of Other Things at Macy’s looked at him sympathetically. “It happens sometimes,” he said quietly and in a voice devoid of the slightest implication that the story was exaggerated in the least, or false in any particular. “I don’t think it will help to bring it home again,” he added. “Somewhere between here and there it will become invisible again. We will take it back, of course” (and pull out its tongue, he thought to himself.)
The Man with the Ladder sighed and took the credit slip with a sense of resignation because he knew it was a hopeless case and he would start feeling the call of the thing again as soon as he walked away and as soon as he left the store would feel that he had made a mistake returning it.
In the elevator going down he wondered what the store did with
items like this that were returned, whether they stuffed them in a closet for a
while then threw them out, or returned them to the manufacturer with a note
saying they were invisible or just donated them to charity and let grace worry
about it. On the subway going home he had three seats to himself to think about
this because he sat with his hands tightly over his ears from
§
The Man with the Ladder had a few friends who were intimate with words. They met, every couple of weeks in the park, in an out door, literary, grass salon. Although the question had never come up formally, there was a unspoken understanding that it was the Man with the Ladder’s salon since it was on his patch of the park that they met. If he did not appear for some reason, the group dissolved into solitary monologues which spiraled off into the void of the park. It was his salon for another reason also. He was the one essential ingredient in the circle: he was the audience.
All of the other participants considered themselves literary people and each of them was convinced that, while he was indispensible, any of the others could be easily replaced. But each felt the absolute need for an audience, and the Man with the Ladder was the best listener any of them knew and the only listener in the group. As the unique element in the little circle they were happy to permit him to host the salon’s gatherings and arbitrate arguments.
Besides the Man with the Ladder there were three regulars at these every-other-Sunday-on-the-grass-soirees: Anatole Sweet, who was employed as a reader for the Encyclopedia of Encyclopedias, Harry Byrne-North, who was the editor of the Journal of Astrological Computing, and Sidney Ardrup, who was the bibliographer and indexer for Bawdy, Grab and Reach, publishers of Recreational and Institutional Pornography.
These lazy Sunday soirees followed a routine almost as fixed as the paths in the park where they took place. They began with a ritual that had been discovered accidentally one day during an argument over terse monologues in children’s stories. It was the ritual of quote making.
The group filtered into the park from different directions and
leisurely drifted together at
It was supposed to be spontaneous but of course, they cheated. Each spent the two weeks between their meetings polishing their adverbs and pronouns and getting their phrasing just right. And they often fought over who was going to give the spontaneous aphorism he had been working on for two weeks first crack at the virginal Sunday.
When he caught the spirit of the game, the Man with the Ladder would urge them on, reminding them of heights they had reached on past Sunday mornings. “Remember when Anatole said, ‘Pride goeth before a fall and passion after a spring’”, or “not quite up to a few weeks ago, Sidney, remember, you said, ‘Even truth can leave you unprepared for reality and feeling that you have been deceived,’” or, “not bad Harry, but you going to have a hard time beating, ‘The best things in life may be free but the store is always out of them and they spoil when you take them out of the box and you can’t claim them as dependents on you tax returns whereas, the worst things in life cost ferociously but are available on easy credit and are childlike and cling and never grow up,’ which was your contribution a month ago.”
The Man with the Ladder took his job of playing Boswell to the three Johnsons seriously. Sometimes it was a bit heavier a load than he would have liked. Once during these impromptu sessions he thought to himself, “When the light comes on it’s wonderful but sometimes you yearn for the darkness again.” He never said anything out loud though.
After the ritual quote making, they rested before turning to what they understood to be the real business of the salon. These lazy Sunday mornings were devoted to literary arguments. They would have dense little intellectual scuffles about which contemporary writer managed secondary plot components better. Or they would argue endlessly about which modern author deployed adverbs of motion best. And sometimes there were fierce debates over which of their peers more effectively controlled the appearance of words at the very top of the printed page.
During these arguments the Man with the Ladder played the attentive spectator. At the end of these debates he was always called upon to decide who had made the better argument. The losers would sulk for a little while until the winner offered to buy everyone lunch as compensation.
There were mornings, however, when the routines and rituals fell
away, when something mythical touched them and they would magically and
effortless be transformed into the Paul Bunyon Literary Society competing with
one another to tell the tallest literary tale. They squared off against one
another for what they called the ‘Maximum Spinners’ award. The prize that went
with this award was the obligation to buy something special to eat, usually
Viennese pastries from the patisserie on
At one of the earlier meetings they had established criteria for an acceptable tall tale: it had to concern some literary event and it had to appear factual. Exaggeration was permitted but within narrow but ambiguous constraints, and the Man with the Ladder was often called to umpire whether a particular tale had taken excessive liberties with the real world.
Whenever he thought about these soirees, one particular Sunday stood out in the Man with the Ladder’s mind. This Sunday was unusual for two reasons. Not only had the decision to become the Paul Bunyan Society been unanimous and almost instantaneous, but everyone waited politely for someone else to begin the days telling.”
“There was this writer I knew. I’ll call him …” he agonized momentarily over a pseudonym, “Bill.”
“You might have heard about him although I think his name was better known on the West coast then on the East. He was the young and fresh literary phenomenon of the year, for a few months, a while back. He didn’t burst on the literary scene. The curtain of fame just parted slightly for him and he was squirted on the stage. He won four literary prizes in the same six month period. Very few people knew the real story behind his accomplishment. I’m not saying I’m the only one, although I think I’m the only one he told all of the details to.
“He had been writing for about 6 years and had finally finished half a novel. He thought it was pretty good. Because he was young and not sure of himself, he sent the half of the novel he had completed to his agent for criticism and approval. He also wanted the agent to tell him whether he should finish it.”
Everyone in the circle snickered.
“I said he was young,”
“When the budding novelist received this communication he was thrilled. He telegraphed the agent back quickly. ‘You have only copy of first half of novel. Return it and I will finish it quickly and we will be famous and rich.’
“I’m sure you want to know why he hadn’t made another copy of the manuscript.” Everyone knew, but waited to be told anyway. “He didn’t have a computer, only a typewriter and he didn’t have the money. On the day he was ready to send out the manuscript, he had a hard choice, and he choose to eat and threw himself on the mercy of the muses, who decided to let him swing in the wind because he imposed on them with a full stomach.
“What he got back was not the first half of his novel but another telegram from his agent saying. ‘Gave first half to film producer for first reading. Producer notorious for taking time to consider possible scripts. Rewrite first half from memory and add second half.’
“Well, the writer thought this a little presumptuous, but he took it as a complement as well. And he did just as he was told.
“He rewrote the first half of the novel from memory, and, in a month, he finished it, by adding a second half. He sent it off feeling clever, professional and a little lucky.
“Now you’d think that experience would have taught him a lesson and that he would make a copy of the novel he had just completed, which was after all, the result of a considerable amount of labor, not all of it of love. You’re right, of course. What is more, he picked what he thought was the safest repository for that manuscript. He left it in the hands of his girl friend.” Everyone sat there waiting for things to turn out badly.
“But his working so hard and long on this novel had alienated her
affections. She felt she had been beaten out by something as mere as a work of
literature. She lost her self respect and with her self respect went any
respect she felt for him. This explains the otherwise incomprehensible the fact
that she trashed the novel, threw it down the incinerator and took off, with a
plumber, for
“He was shattered, and he was terrified, and it was in desperate panic that he cabled his agent.
“‘Did you receive manuscript of completed novel?’ his message read, to which came the reply, ‘Manuscript received, message will follow.’ And it did. What it said was, ‘New first half of novel not the same as old first half of novel. Second part of new novel does not match old first half. I am returning old first half. Rewrite second half. Producer felt it was weak in central theme: he will reconsider complete novel. Finish fast!’
“Now when Bill received the old first half of his novel he recognized that what his agent had said was true. He had changed the first half of the novel drastically, and the ending he had written to complete what his memory told him was the first half of his novel just did not fit the old first half. It was a shock to him to see how radically his memory had altered what he thought was so much a living part of him.
“But with the old first half of his novel in hand, he proceeded to redo the job he believed he had already finished. He rewrote the ending of the novel and sent the old first part and the new second part off to his agent. When he thought about what he had done it dawned on him that he had two novels which like the children of two sets of circumstances bore no relationship to one another at all.
“Now the next cable our hero received was from Switzerland where
his vacationing agent had received a call from one of the publishers to whom he
had sent the manuscript ‘Publisher loved the novel’, the telegram to our author
read. ‘Was absolutely caught up with character of opera
singer whose voice changes in middle years. Insists
she be made a major character and theme of sea change be developed.
Assurances will publish novel. Am off on Safari. Send
completed manuscript to
“Now the author remembered no such character. He reread his copy of the masterwork and the closest thing he could find was a discussion at the end of the second chapter in which the villain is talking about a movie he saw in which an opera singer changes her sex and after a violent struggle with the impresario, her former lover, wins the tenor’s role.
“At this point, as you might suppose, the author was thoroughly discouraged. He was ready to turn his back on the whole business, but his hunger for fame and glory and food restrained him. He made what he believed was a minor revision in his novel to make a central place for an opera star making a deep water dive, as he put it. Of course you know what happened.” The two other literary people nodded knowingly, but the Man with the Ladder held his breath.
“Even the greatest of novelists has limitations.” Everyone sighed.
“Although in his own mind he had merely introduced a minor twist on the path
from where he thought the novel began to where he knew it ended, he had
produced another novel, entirely different from the two preceding it. On the
day he sent it out to his agents
“‘Publisher who planned to publish book massacred editor and chief
reader and shot self and mistress. Have shown it to new publisher who handles
mostly religious books but is looking to branch out and expand catalogue.
Guarantees will publish it if introduce religious theme and cut out all
references to sex of any kind except with, or between, or involving in any form
of animals. Sending advance for anticipated revision’”
and the cable stopped and began again with some money. It ended with the
sentence ‘Am off on Safari again. Send manuscript to
“Now, as I said the young writer was hungry, physically as well as spiritually. He determined to refuse to continue a situation he believed had become a gross and bloated farce. Before the determination could take root however, he spent the money and felt compelled to deliver a novel in which a religious theme was developed and any sex except with or between or involving animals was excluded.
“He was angry and confused and felt betrayed by his own talent. He
contemplated suicide and rejected it. He began to hallucinate periodically that
he been transformed into a weird beast that was a cross between a chimera and a
sphinx with a penis as big and as crooked as the
“It was in this condition, tottering on the precipice of a breakdown that he finished a revision of his novel with a religious theme and all references to sex cut out except with, or between, or involving animals. The process of mailing it healed him and he immediately forgot he had written it.
“Unfortunately, at the moment he was pushing the manuscript through
the little slot in the post office, his agent was
dying a very interesting death in
“The next cable he received was from the executor of the agent’s will. It said tersely, ‘Am returning under separate cover a collection of manuscripts with your name on them.’”
Everyone waited for the denouement. “He never received them,”
“Shortly after this he received a letter from the editor whose
letters were mistakenly addressed to him. I’ll ignore the details and get to
the meat of the matter,”
“There was a P.S.. ‘I was wondering if by
any chance you received a package which should have been addressed to me. If so, we could work out a mutual exchange at an agreed upon spot
in the
“I swear to you it’s a true story. The novels were all published and they won the prizes they so richly deserved. Bill denies the story, preferring the explanation that he succeeded because of brains, personality and creativity.”
Not everybody was entirely pleased with the story, although the Man with the Ladder thought it was wonderful.
“That’s not bad,” commented Harry Byrne-North, “not bad at all. Only it seems to me to be a little ornate for a piece of fact. I’ll tell you a simple story about a man who, a few years ago, won the Pierpont-Norton fellowship, you know the one that pays you a stipend for the rest of your life as long as you publish anything you write under the pseudonym Pierpont-Norton. His name was Jim before the award changed it.
“The person I’m talking about wasn’t always a writer. He had been trained as a classical musician. His instrument was the piccolo and for years he shared the first chair at the Philharmonic.
“In the middle of a furious passage of a piccolo solo in the Bandit Suite by Stuckert he had a vision. A virgin came to him in the form of an arpeggio and told him to trade his piccolo in for a typewriter. He took his visions seriously and did as he was told.
“Now it was a strange thing. Although he changed his medium he retained his old habits. He would start the day practicing. He would do the equivalent of scales for about an hour or two before he settled down to what he considered his serious writing. I think,” Harry Byrne-North commented, “the form this exercise took was the most interesting thing about his writing.
“In college he had taken a creative writing course. The term project for the course was a short story. His teacher thought the one he submitted prosaic and dull and gave him C+. What he would do every day is take that story, and for practice, rewrite it.”
“The same story?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“The same story. He put in plastic covers so that he wouldn’t smudge it, and each day, before he settled down to his serious writing, he would reread his old college assignment and produce a new story. Then, after he finished his scales so to speak, he would turn over the pages he had just filled with practice writing and settle down to the serious job of writing his great, universal novel.
“When he finished his masterpiece he made 10 copies and sent them out to the first ten names on a list of possible publishers he had copied from the Writers Digest.”
“Now he was as poor as any of us, poorer. He had no steady job. He gave Piccolo lessons when he could find a student, which was rarely. Making the ten copies had broken his bank. And having sent out all the copies he could afford to make, he waited. He didn’t wait long. When the first four rejection notices came, he sent the four returned manuscripts to four publishers lower down on his list.
“As the rejection notices came back, he became more and more discouraged. I met him about this time, in this park actually, over there.” He pointed to the entrance of the park where the sixteen year old had been transported on her skateboard. We fell into this conversation about literary things and piccolos.
“He asked my advice and I gave it to him freely. At the time a friend of mine had just signed on with a new publishing company that was angling to be taken over by an oil company. They were expecting a glut of greasy capital which they could turn to literary productions. Send him your manuscript, was my advice.
“‘I wish I could’, he said, dejectedly, ‘but I’ve used up all my cash. I haven’t the money to make another copy.’”
“Now at the time I was rather strapped myself so I couldn’t help him that way. But since he had ten copies circulating and they were coming back as fast as he could send them out, I couldn’t see that parting with the original would hurt him at all. ‘Send him the original,’ I suggested. ‘He’s very responsible and I guarantee you that there’s no chance he will lose or misplace it.’ He took my advice.”
Harry waited.
“Well, did they like the novel?” the Man with the Ladder asked quietly.
“That’s a good question. A strange thing happened. My friend at the publishing house to whom the manuscript was addressed swears it was not his fault, but when the manuscript arrived at his office he opened it and put on his desk back side up.”
“What do you mean back side up?” asked the Man with the Ladder.
“With the short stories facing up. all those exercises day after day, all those rewrites of the same story.”
Harry Byrne_North waited a moment before he continued. “He loved it.”
“Just who loved what?” asked the Man with the Ladder
“The publisher loved the short stories. They sent the ex-piccolo player a contract which he signed without looking at it. He was furious when he found out they were publishing his exercises. He felt they were worthless five finger pieces.”
“How about the novel?” someone asked. “Oh, they finally rejected it just as all of the other companies had rejected it. I never knew why, but he was completely demoralized by the turn of events and gave up writing altogether. When he won the prize no one could quite figure out where to send it to him. As far as I know the check was deposited in his account but it just sits there gathering interest.”
Everyone sat there meditating on the fickleness and chancy character of success, and watching the 16 year old maneuver around a child who was having a tantrum in the middle of the path in front of them.
Anatole Sweet picked up the thread of the contest.
“Do you know the literary prixe the Yugoslavs
give every five years?” Anatole began. Everyone acknowledged the prize,
not because they had heard of it, but because such acknowledgment was expected
of them. “As you know it’s worth 50,000 dinars payable in
“Never heard of Baltcher,” Harry Byrne-North remarked caustically.
“Probably not,” Anatole agreed pleasantly. “The only thing he ever wrote was the novel that won the prize. I’m going to tell you how he wrote that novel.” Everyone settled back into a defensive listening posture.
“He was a Hungarian who left his native
Everyone snickered at the insiders joke and looked at the Man with the Ladder to make sure he had gotten it, but he gave no indication that he had heard anything but a simple statement of fact.
“Baltcher was not really a writer. He worked in a library, but he was indifferent to books. His reading was confined mostly to magazines in which words appeared at the bottom of drawings or pictures.
“The only vaguely literary thing about him was his fascination with Shakespeare. His acquaintance with the Bard was limited to what he remembered from high school English, because after he graduated he gave up reading. He felt it unnecessarily burdened his existence. But the romance of Shakespeare inexplicably haunted him.
“As I said, he limited his reading severely. But working at the library has its occupational hazards like any other occupation. One day while he was taking a damaged bound volume of magazines up to the bindery to be repaired, it fell open, and almost in spite of himself, he started reading the mutilated page it had opened to.
“It was not a story but part of an essay. You know the fragment. It’s that little scummage in which the author states that if you put a hundred monkeys in a room in front of a hundred typewriters and set them typing, in the long run they will produce all of Shakespeare.”
“I never thought that was very complementary to Shakespeare,” Harry commented. “It wouldn’t be so easy to reproduce my works,” he added self assuredly. Anatole ignored the interruption.
“Well, this little statement fascinated and intrigued Baltcher. It freed and bound him in the same moment. He said to himself, ‘if monkeys can do it, why not me.’ It’s the way inspiration comes to some people,” Anatole remarked quietly, looking at Harry.
“What he understood the article to be saying was that the key to writing Shakespeare was a proper state of animated typing, and he believed that Shakespeare was related to monkeyness the way other authors might be related to tigerness or horseness, although he thought that put them up the creek since tigers and horses could not be as adept as monkeys at typing.
“His fascination with Shakespeare absorbed him. He wanted to write Shakespeare. The fact that Shakespeare was written already did not seem to bother him. The idea of copying Shakespeare from a book never entered his head. He wanted to sit at the typewriter and compose Shakespeare.”
“That’s dumb,” Harry interjected. “The whole business is dumb. The example is an illustration of randomness,” he added, wanting to display his grasp of science. “It would require an infinite length of time to produce the collected works.”
“You know that, and I know that,” Anatole said smugly, “but my friend did not. And he wouldn’t have believed you anyway. Besides, I’m only reporting what happened,” Anatole stated, and restarted his narrative abruptly.
“Baltchar quit his job at the library and bought himself a typewriter. He reduced his diet to peanuts and bananas. He strove with all of his being to put himself into what he felt was an extreme state of monkeyness, and began typing.
“For the first two months the only thing that came out was a jumble of letters. Sometimes they filled a whole page without a space. Other days only four letter sequences appeared. He was beginning to be discouraged when somewhere in the third month he started typing and what appeared on the page was a paragraph that began, `It was the best of time and it was the worst of times’ and went on in that tone for pages and pages.
“When he stopped and looked over what he had written that day, he tried to decide whether it could be something of Shakespeare’s that he might never had heard of. The only thing of Shakespeare’s he knew for sure was a few snatches from the Sonnets and parts of a scene of two from Hamlet. He briefly entertained the thought of rereading Shakespeare but rejected the idea because he was afraid this would open him up to the charge of plagiarism when he finally started producing the master’s works. He felt certain that paying close attention to what he was typing would be enough to permit him to recognize Shakespeare when he finally got around to writing him. He reread what he had just typed and decided tentatively that it was a false start, not Shakespeare. He was both discouraged and encouraged by this development.
“Over the next two months interesting things appeared at his
typewriter. One long coherent run of pages began ‘Well, prince,
“To say he was disappointed is to understate the case. He thought of giving up, but the anticipation of failure sickened him, so he went back to the typewriter with renewed determination. His conviction deepened that what was wrong was that he could not maintain himself in intimate contact with the essence of monkeyness for long enough.
“For a week or so after he resumed typing nothing came out but gibberish. Choppy sentences in what looked like some strange language. And then for four weeks another coherent manuscript appeared at his typewriter. It began ‘I met Nick Strayte where you meet half of the faculty on campus if you wait long enough, in the bathroom.’ Three hundred and twelve pages followed.”
Because all of the rest of the salon was watching the girl on the skateboard negotiate a few tricky turns, no one noticed the Man with the Ladder sit straight up and stare at Anatole, who, after shaking off the distraction, continued.
“He liked whatever it was but he had the nagging feeling it was not one of Shakespeare’s plays. None of the scenes he remembered as definitely Shakespeare appeared in it. But he was not absolutely certain so he took it to someone he knew from the library who had read all of Shakespeare and this person confirmed what he had suspected all along. It was definitely not Shakespeare.
“He was depressed and demoralized. As far as he could see he was doing everything right. Yet Shakespeare remained obdurate and kept himself hidden. In the depths of that depression he came to the conclusion that either he was doing something wrong or that the author of the article in which he had read this technique had omitted something. He made up his mind that he would have to do something drastic if he was going to achieve his goal.”
“What did he do?” asked the Man with the Ladder with uncharacteristic anxiety.
Anatole smiled. “He went back to the magazine in which he had read the article and got the name of the author. It just so happened that the man who wrote the article was a famous literary critic I shall not name. Anatole wrote him a letter.
“‘Dear Mr.______, it began. I read your article in The Bankers Quarterly. I have to report that it was not factual in particulars. I am enclosing an example of the kind of thing that comes out when I follow the procedure you outlined for producing Shakespeare. As you can see it is not Shakespeare. I have followed your technique for writing Shakespeare to the letter. What am I doing wrong? I await your response. Yours truly. Baltchar.’
“The way Baltchar tells it he got a letter back from this critic saying that he never read manuscripts that were sent to him but that the altogether quaint and curious letter introducing the manuscript had totally captured his attention and disarmed him. He said he thought that the novel was a work of genius and that, with Batchar’s permission, he would submit it to a publisher he knew.
“I am not sure of the exact train of events that followed. The end
result was that the manuscript was published in
“What about Baltchar?” the Man with the Ladder asked
“Baltchar went to
After a reasonable silence the three aspirants for the Maximum Spinner award turned to the Man with the Ladder. “Well, who is the winner?” Arthur asked. They were surprised to see the Man with the Ladder pale and struggling for breath.
“Is anything wrong?” Harry asked, speaking for all of the salon.
“No, of course not, a piece of dust in my throat I will be OK in a minute.” The Man with the Ladder recovered his composure quickly and picked up his role where he had set it down.
“Close as it is, because the stories were all wonderful, the Maximum Spinner today is Anatole.”
“Can’t accept,” Anatole said, pretending to hand the invisible award back. “It’s a true story. I just changed the facts to protect the innocent.” Then, after a moment he relented. “OK, I know when I’ve been had,” he said with mock resentment, but brimming with pride. It’s Danish all round,” and he set off across the park with Harry and Sidney sulking behind him.
“I’ll catch up in a minute,” said the Man with the Ladder fumbling with his perch. In his head he heard his own voice reading from a half finished manuscript that he would never complete. “‘I met Nick Strayte where you meet half of the faculty on campus if you wait long enough, the bathroom. He was tall, standing away from the urinal with abandon. ‘I’ve never seen you before,’ he said, ‘at least the pecker isn’t familiar.’”
§
The Man with the Ladder was the informal leader and referee of a four man literary society that met every third Sunday in the park.
The other members of the group, Anatole Sweet, Byrne-North and Sidney Adrup were writers and, more than writers, they were talkers about writing. Because the Man with the Ladder did not consider himself a literary person and could be indifferent about the most momentous and contentious literary matters, he was assigned the jobs of audience and group leader.
His duties were simple. When the three other members of the group finally arrived in the park he greeted them and waited quietly while they pumped themselves up into the dispute that identified the topic of the day’s meeting. Then he refereed the wrangle and chose the person who presented the most convincing argument about whatever they were arguing about and gave them their prize—which was the obligation to take the little group out for coffee and croissants. The meetings were usually loud, unruly and intricate.
Like any group, they had fallen into a well established routine but occasionally the meetings of the group surprised him. One Sunday, when the weather looked like it was going to pick a winner by torrentially raining on his argument, the group spent the morning uncharacteristically competing to see who could maintain a literary silence for the longest period of time. The meeting had begun with a vicious argument between Byrne-North and Sidney Ardrup about Shakespere’s use of numbers as baudy. Byrne-North asserted that each time the master used ‘two’ he was referring metaphorically to male genitals and ‘three’ was always a reference to essential parts of the female anatomy. Sidney Ardrup insisted that this was unnecessarily dragging Kabala into literature and that two was usually meant two unless it was deliberately misspelled, when meant just more than one.
They segued from the argument about number into one about the absence of number, then they argued about the absence of other things like letters, plots, paper and finally sound itself, at which point Anatole Sweet joined in and it became and argument about different kinds of silence. Anatole Sweet insisted that the cadence of literary silence was distinct from the rhythm of other kinds of silence. Sidney Ardrup argued that the real distinction was in the texture of the silence while Byrne-north claimed that the difference was entirely in the context of the silence. They harangued each other silently and silently mocked one another’s speechlessness and the Man with the Ladder had to step in frequently to admonish one or the other that sticking out a tongue was a breech of silence and that an extended finger added an element to silence that violated the spirit of literature.
After a while Sidney Adrup and Byrne-North drifted away silently and the Man with the Ladder declared, in the absence of rain, Analtole Sweet the default winner of the competition
“That was a tremendous meeting of the literary society,” Anatole Sweet said by way of a victory speech. “How about coming over to my place for lunch, a snack, nothing very elaborate,” he added.
When the Man with the Ladder hesitated Anatole Sweet added, “It’s not a bribe,” he said, “the competition is over, and I’m sure accepting an invitation to lunch, will not affect your scrupulous impartiality and your neutrality in the future,” he said. Reassured, the Man with the Ladder quickly accepted the invitation. “Not much recently to be neutral about today,” the Man with the Ladder complained.
The Man with the Ladder liked all of the members of the small literary society, but outside of the meetings of the group, he preferred the companionship of Anatole Sweet, who seemed the most practical in an impractical way. All three of them were constantly defending literature against all manner of imagined attacks, But of the three, only Anatole Sweet did not make excessive claims for writing. He pointed out that life in general often left something to be desired in the way of excitement, entertainment and reality and literature, good literature, provided all three. But he conceded that most of the other arguments for literature were propaganda which writers created because they worked so hard for such a small reward—and they were often denied even that, or given it posthumously—and they had to make what they were doing more important than it really was so that there would be a reason to continue doing it. If they didn’t, he argued, those who were not completely whacky would look at the enterprise rationally and conclude they would be better off using their imagination to sell mutual funds, or create web sites and, in a little while, the only people writing literature would be those whose imagination was so impoverished that they could not imagine doing anything else.
The Man with the Ladder (who had never been to any of the houses of the members of the literary society) followed Anatole Sweet home excitedly. They bantered over Shakespeare while his friend set the table and brought out lunch. He put down a wonderful looking roast on the table and he brought out a loaf of bread, wine and two oranges. “I guess that will have to do,” he said. Anatole Sweet cut up the oranges and carved slices from the roast and distributed them over two plates, then he and the Man with the Ladder more or less simultaneously cut off small pieces of meat and put it in their mouths. As the Man with the Ladder’s tongue touched the meat a sour taste flooded his mouth.
“Don’t chew it,” his friend said suddenly after he had tasted it. “Spit it out. The Man with the Ladder did as he was told.
“It’s awful,” Anatole Sweet said as the Man with the Ladder put down his fork. “Awful,” Anatole Sweet said. “It will spoil the taste of food for weeks” He cleaned the meat off of the plates and took out a jar of peanut butter. “Peanut butter will have to do,” he said enthusiastically, making each of them a thick peanut butter sandwich.
“The peanut butter tastes like a pate,” the Man with the Ladder said chewing the peanut butter sandwich noisily and sipping the wine. The meal was very satisfying. Anatole Sweet apologized for the meat disaster and invited the Man with the Ladder back. “I have to make it up to you,” he added.
“No need to apologize, I’ll be happy to come again,” the Man with the Ladder said. “It really was delicious. That must have been a vintage year for peanut butter.”
After the next meeting of the literary society which featured a competition to see who could come up with the best set of metaphors about metaphors about metaphors, Anatole Sweet again invited the Man with the Ladder to his home for lunch.
“I’d be imposing,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“No not at all,” Anatole said. “I’d like to make it up to you, I mean for the meat.”
“I should take you for lunch this time,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Don’t even think about the meat.”
“You can take me out next time,” Anatole sweet said as they headed for his house.
The Man with the Ladder made himself comfortable at his friends table. “Soup today,” Anatole Sweet said. “Just a snack, soup, bread and wine. He set the table and lit the gas under a big pot of soup. “Just finished making it this morning,” he said. He ladled soup into two bowls and he and the Man with the Ladder each scooped out a spoonful.
The Man with the Ladder spoon as perched on his lips when Anatole Sweet burst out, “Don’t swallow” but it was to late.
The Man with the Ladder gagged.
“It’s awful,” Anatole Sweet conceded as he gathered the soup bowls and set them on the counter. “I guess it’s peanut butter again,” he said resignedly. He reset the table with wine, bread and peanut butter for each of them and they ate quietly.
“The soup,” the Man with the Ladder said after a silence, “tasted …”
“Like the meat. I never throw food away,” Anatole Sweet explained, “never. If a cut of meat is not good as a meat dish I mash it up, put a little honey in it, mix it with a little flour and make it into a pudding. Sometimes a failure as a roast is outstanding as a pudding,”he said, pausing for a moment.
The Man with the Ladder waited.
“And if it doesn’t make a respectable pudding—and this one was an awful pudding—sometimes it makes a spectacular soup. That piece of meat,” he said, “that piece of meat was ornery. It was mean, thin and sour as everything. It didn’t make it as a soup either.”
The Man with the Ladder was sure there was more to come. “If the soup doesn’t work?” he asked, “if the soup doesn’t work what then?”
“I never throw food away, never,” Anatole Sweet repeated. “If the soup doesn’t work,” the writer said with smile, “if the soup doesn’t work.” he said, as he poured the soup down the drain and handed the Man with the Ladder an apple from the bowl of fruit on the refrigerator, “I make it into a story.”
§
The Man with the Ladder wrote a story. It was a short story, compact, sleek and decisive. It came into the world on the back of a envelope, fully formed and complete, and never grew warts, or pig tails or any bigger.
If you make up stories, you know that, like kittens from the same litter, some of them appeal to you more than others. When, for the first time, the Man with the Ladder reread the story he had written, he fell in love with it.
Everything about it pleased him. He liked its scrupulous imagery. He liked the way its well cut metaphors were set in phrases like jewels in a brooch, and the way the phrases, regular and glowing, clung to one another but were distinct, like an expensive string of pearls. He like the way its plot flowed and clung to the earth around hairpin turns. He liked the way it began, and the way it ended. He even liked the way it was punctuated, and the way it looked on the page. In short, he loved it all.
But he found, after he read and reread it many times, that he didn’t understand it. The most he could manage were crystals of comprehension that collapsed instantaneously into powdery heaps of confusion, or glimmerings of sense that were quickly eclipsed by contradiction.
The Man with the Ladder was one of those people who believed that love and understanding were synonyms rather than contraries, and he was bothered a great deal by this lack of understanding.
Since he loved the story he determined to understand it. He reasoned that, even though he had made this story up, other people might grasp its meaning better than he did, and that he could discover what it meant by finding out what other people thought its meaning was.
Because he was a subtle and creative person, he found a way, whenever he talked to anyone, to slip this story into the conversation. Sometimes it would ostensibly be to illustrate a point he had made. Other times, he would dust it off to emphasize a point that the other person had made. Sometimes he rolled it out just to fill a silence.
But after doing this for a while he realized that, although a great many people liked the story, no one understood it, and everybody he told the story to, waited for him to make its meaning clear to them. When he did not, because he could not, they backed over it, out of the conversation.
As time went on, he grew more and more discouraged, and although his affection for it endured, he despaired of ever finding out what the story he loved so much, meant. He began to look at it as a betrayed lover looks at his used-to-be-beloved, towards whom his eyes and his heart pull him, while his common sense and experience drive him away. He began to leave it out of his conversations, seizing any excuse to avoid it.
One day he was in the park, dejectedly trying to germinate the seeds of a story he could not only love, but encompass and comprehend, when he met his friend, Reb Dunzel, a Hasid who wore a baseball cap and sneakers. Their first topic of conversation was the child playing in front of them who the Man with the Ladder was babysitting while her mother was working. The conversation leaped gently to chants, a topic the Man with the Ladder had no interest in at all, although the way the Rebbe talked about them, they seemed to be pregnant with meaning.
Reb Dunzel seemed to have at least a tenuous hold on a number of things that had no handles at all, and the Man with the Ladder thought that he might be able to tell him what the story meant, or at least, shed some light on it, and he got ready to lead the conversation to where the story lay, cradled and blanketed in mystery, (and, he was beginning to feel) cunning and deceit.
Then a strange thing happened, at least it seemed a strange thing at the time. He heard Reb Dunzel say, “that reminds me of a story I heard recently,” and then start to tell him his own beloved, mysterious story. Now the Man with the Ladder’s first impulse was to interrupt him and yell, “but that’s my tale,” but he stopped himself and listened to Reb Dunzel tell the story. And, although he couldn’t tell why, its meaning suddenly became crystal clear to him.
After he finished telling the story, and the little silence that marks occasions like this was over, Reb Dunzel confessed that he had no idea what the story meant.
“I would like to meet the man who made it up,” he said sadly. “He must be a genius to have shaped such a wonderful story. It’s clear to me,” he added, “it’s absolutely clear to me, that such a story was crafted to convey its meaning precisely and directly.” And he reigned in his talking to give the Man with the Ladder a chance to respond and tell him the meaning he had found in the story.
But, although the Man with the Ladder could not quite explain why at the time, he could not tell Reb Dunzel what the story meant, even though its meaning had become absolutely clear to him, and he was infinitely grateful to the Rebbe for helping him see that meaning. “I’m sure,” Reb Dunzel continued after the silence was used up, “I’m sure that the only reason I do not understand the meaning of the story is that I am a little slow, and the only reason you can’t see its meaning is that I have told the story badly.” Although the Man with the Ladder tried to disabuse him of the notion, Reb Dunzel refused to let go of it and carried this belief home with him as if it balanced the mystery of the story, and allowed him to love it.
Walking home later with his ladder on his back, the Man with the Ladder thought about what had happened. He decided that it was not ingratitude or covetousness that kept him from telling Reb Dunzel what the story meant. It was that, while the story had a meaning, the meaning belonged to only part of it, and once you knew the meaning, all the other parts of the story became invisible, and you had a different story, or only the piece of it that the meaning made visible, which looked like a different story like another less lovable cat from the same litter.
As he walked, he glanced at the story, which was had stretched out and was relaxing in a corner of his mind, and saw it was a crafty thing to have set itself up to be made in that way, and he saw himself as a victim of the queerest sort of loving.
And somewhere between the park and home, he decided that loving and understanding were the same side of two different coins and that understanding someone or something did not tell you what you loved nor why you loved it, but told you something else entirely but he arrived home before he could tell exactly what.
§
The Man with the Ladder was working his second, non-paying, job babysitting Tatanya Schwarz. He sat solidly on the top rung of his ladder while the little girl curled weightless on the bench next to him, elbows and knees crookedly poking out. He had babysat the little girl many times before in the park but this time seemed different although he could not put his finger firmly on the difference, and what he could put his finger on did not make a lot of sense to him.
Ordinary days were content to be bare, propless stages on which life improvised. But the day around him resisted playing its part as an unadorned platform on which life made things up as it went along. It insisted on slipping a bold, contrasting scrim behind events as if it were making faces behind life’s back. It drew a thin, dark line outlining anything that happened, so that it seemed to begin more sharply and flicker and flutter a little when it ended and stayed separate instead of flowing into whatever happened after it. It seemed to him that the little girl felt the difference also because she was quieter than usual, not as quick with questions, not as insistent upon answers.
They had eaten the lunch the girls mother had prepared and spent the time together afterwards observing things and events in the park around them without commenting on them.
Suddenly the little girl spoke up. “How did you get into this line of work?” she asked.
“Line of work, what line of work?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“Babysitting,” the little girl replied, “babysitting me.”
“I wouldn’t call it a line of work exactly. You are the only person I babysit.”
“Why do you do it?” the little girl asked, “you don’t get paid for it.”
“Not in the usual way,” the Man with the Ladder said. “No money changes hands. Work is paid for in different ways. Anyway,” he added, “I never think about it as work.”
“But babysitting is a job,” the girl protested. “I’m going to be a babysitter when I get a little older and I expect to be paid for it.”
“It may not be work for you either, if you really like it, even though you get paid for it.”
“Well, how did you get the job of babysitting me?”
“Oh,”the Man with the Ladder said, “my habits got me the job.”
“Your habits.”
“My habits. I would come to the park in the morning and sit on the ladder and think about things for a while until the afternoon came and I would leave for my afternoon job, when I had an afternoon job. I guess your mother noticed me sitting there from day to day. And she could see the people who I knew and who knew me. Well, I was sitting in the park one day on my ladder, the way I always sit on the ladder,” he continued, “and your mother brought you and she put you on the bench next to the ladder and said to you very loudly, ‘I have a job. I’ll be back in half an hour, an hour tops.’ I remember you nodded. I nodded too. And she asked ‘will you be alright here?’ and you nodded and I nodded.”
“Why did you nod? the girls asked.
“I thought you would be alright there,” the Man with the Ladder said, “so I nodded. She put down a paper bag. ‘I’ve made two sandwiches in case you have guest for lunch, and two milks and two applies. and two treats. A half hour, and hour tops,’ she repeated. and I nodded. And that is the way I got the job. I think it was the ladder,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you want me to tell you a story?” he asked.
“Not just exactly now,” the little girl said, “not quite yet.”
“Is something wrong?” the Man with the Ladder asked, concerned because the Tatanya Schwartz had never turned down a story.
“No, not at all,” the girl said. “Just the opposite. Everything is … do you see the sun?”
“I do,” the Man with the Ladder said. “It is particularly sunny today.”
The girl looked at him. “The sun’s light is thick today. Look at the way it is spilling off of the trees.”
“I didn’t notice that before,” the Man with the Ladder said.
“Everything seems just right today,” the little girl continued. “Things are just as they should be. Everything is where it is. There is the Zen Master with his students, and Reb Dunzel arguing with Timothy Michael. You are on your ladder babysitting me, and I am on the bench where I usually am, and we ate the sandwiches my mother left, and we drank the milks. You still have some on your …”
The Man with the Ladder wiped his face with his sleeve.
The little girl sighed. “it is so perfect today.”
“Isn’t this the way it usually is?” the Man with the Ladder asked. “I don’t see anything quite different from most of the other days when we are together and I am babysitting.”
“Perhaps not,” the little girl said, “perhaps that is what makes it special. Would you tell me a story now,” the little girl asked, “a God story.”
“It will have to be a very short story,” the Man with the Ladder responded. “Your mother should be showing up very soon.”
“A small story then, a small story about God.”
“Most of the God stories I know are long, large stories. I mean after all they are about God.”
“A small story about God. I am sure you know one,” Tatanya Schwartz declared confidently.
“I think I do have one,” the Man with the Ladder said after a moment, “I think I do,” and he launched into a small God story.
“Well early one day God was doing God like business when he suddenly remembered that he had forgotten something. He remembered it was a very small thing, a tiniest thing but very precious to him, and it bothered him a lot that he could not remember this thing.”
“What was it?” the little girl asked.
“God wracked his brain but could not remember. He made a list of everything he remembered, everything he had created or destroyed, everything he had brought forth or swept away, raised up or brought down, each miracle he had done or refrained from doing. It was a very long list and he went down it to refresh his memory but he could not remember what he had left out.”
“Oh,” said the little girl.
“Then he called Lucifer—the Devil—and asked if he remembered what he had forgotten.”
“Why would the Devil remember what God forgot?” the little girl wanted to know.
“Well Lucifer was a busybody. He kept good tabs on God so that he could make trouble. He went over the list and reminded God of a few things he left out but they were all big things.”
“Like Job.”
“Like Job, and the sixth day, and other things.”
“And Lucifer threw up his wings and said, ‘beats me,’ and looked at God suspiciously as if it was a trap God was setting, but God had a perplexed, sad look on his countenance.”
“Countenance?” the little girl repeated.
“How God looked,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Then God called all of the angels together and asked each of them if they could remember the littlest thing that he had forgotten. They started remembering things but soon each of them remembered some personal, angelic lapse of memory and drifted off to take care of it, and after a little while there were no angels around remembering anything. They were all gone and none of them had remembered the littlest thing that God had forgotten and God went back to trying to remember the littlest thing.
“Oh,” Tatanya Schwartz said anxiously.
“And …” The man with the ladder stopped. “There is your mother,” he said, pointing to the figure of a woman rushing toward them.
The little girl sat quietly and the Man with the Ladder waited for her to ask how the story ended but she did not. She sat watching the figure of her mother rushing towards them. “This has been a perfect day,” she said. “everything was just right. The sandwiches were good, the light was wonderful, the park was …”
“That’s it,” the Man with the Ladder said suddenly.
“That’s it, what?” the little girl asked.
“That’s what God wanted to remember, this day, you and me sitting and talking. “You being all of a little girl completely and …”
“You being the Man with the Ladder,” the little girl added.
“Yes exactly.”
“I will remember it always,” the little girl said. “And I will remind God.”
“I’m sure he remembers it now that you remember it,” the Man with the Ladder said. “But it is a very ordinary day,” he added. “Do you think you will remember it? People forget ordinary, special things.”
“I will remember it,” Tatanya Schwartz said, “even when I get to be as old as you or my mother. I wonder,” she said, “why God forgot it?”
“Perhaps it was so difficult to remember because it hadn’t happened yet,” the Man with the Ladder suggested. “Remembering things that have not quite happened yet is particularly difficult, even for God. But if you remember it,” he added, “I am certain God will not forget it again,” the Man with the Ladder said as the girls mother swooped up her child with a loving hug and said, “I’ve brought us all a special treat.”
§
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel were doing a
They were shuffling because, long lines of tourists—Germans and Texans mostly—plugged the entrances of their favorite restaurants, snaking in jittery, ravenous queues across the sidewalk to the gutter of the street, confronting them with an indefinite wait to get even a mouthful of their favorite meals.
“At this rate we might as well try a Chinese restaurant in
Normally they savored the choice of the restaurant as much as they
savored the meal. In their heads, they maintained a ranking of restaurants they
had eaten at over the years and usually, they limited their choice of a
restaurant to those at the very top of the list. This particular evening
however, they desperately rifled through their memories of twenty years of
eating in
They worked themselves down their mental inventory of restaurants as they sought out a place to eat. They had shuffled past the good, slid beyond the palatable and were reduced to rooting around the ‘eatable’ at the bottom of the list, searching for any restaurant they remembered as serving edible food, preferably off the beaten track, in hopes that it might have an empty table and some cold noodles.
Their unhappiness about being displaced from their restaurants by tourists was compounded by a general frustration that had hung over their meals for the last month or two. They were writers.
Over the years, their Chinese dinners were occasions for writing,
and the byproduct of their weekly excursions to
Reb Dunzel’s wife, Sister Greb, had urged them to give up the search for the elusive missing story. “Ignore the hole and try to publish the collection without a finale,” she advised them. “If you hold out for an perfect ending you’re as likely to stumble on another beginning and that book of yours will go on forever.” She was right, as usual. But her advice fell on deaf ears. Neither of them was capable of listening. They were compelled by some force they did not understand to search for the story that would complete the collection.
The search for a final story occupied them completely. Activities they did not manage to avoid were done perfunctorily and absentmindedly and they depended on routine and habit to carry them through the day. They never looked at the people they talked to but stared off to the side, scanning the horizon for an idea for a finale, peeling back a layer of a plot to the left, trying to see under the edge of some flash of inspiration to the right. At the checkout counter in the supermarket Reb Dunzel would suddenly begin to scribble ideas on a bag of groceries until the people in the line behind him would whine and yell and finally push him—still scribbling—and his shopping cart to the side. Waiting on line in the post office, the Man with the Ladder would use the back of the person in line in front of him as a support to sketch out an inspiration on the back of the envelope he had come to mail then take the letter home and tuck it away and forget it until he went to bed.
After the Man with the Ladder walked off the top rung of the ladder complaining as he fell about the turn some plot had taken, the zen master tried to recenter him but gave up and Tatnaya Schwartz used their time together to babysit him. Sister Greb made Reb Dunzel spend hours in the shower with the water running and got in touch with her former mother superior and asked her if she knew of some candidate for sainthood who needed a miracle to her credit and asked for a really potent prayer for difficult but unusual circumstances. Their search for a final story to complete their book turned the lives of the people around them upside down but no one could help at all. After a while, their friends wrote them off as temporarily defective and ignored them as much as possible: when ignoring them was not possible, they made them stand in corners and write or talk to themselves.
That they would end up like this, wandering, not able to find a
meal in all of
“Have we ever explored this street?” the Man with the Ladder asked, pointing to a narrow street that seemed to appear in the middle of a block.
“We’ve been walking so long tonight, I think we’ve covered every
street in
They had turned to each other with the unspeakable in their eyes when a man in a waiter’s uniform appeared out of nowhere and grabbed them both by the arm.
“Late! Verry Late!” He chastised them like an old friend, “Everyone waiting!” Before they could seize enough of their wits to resist or even ask who ‘they’ were, he pulled them through a small arched doorway into what appeared to be an extremely non-standard Chinese restaurant.
“This is one of those places!,” the Man with the Ladder said, looking for a place to lean his ladder.
“Yes, that’s what I’m afraid of,” said Reb Dunzel, “no ducks in the window, no plastic collages of endlessly falling water, no artificial plants to be seen anywhere and a map of Hungary on the wall. This is just the out-of-the-ordinary kind of place that means either disaster or nirvana. And with our luck so far tonight, I wouldn’t bet on nirvana.”
“Your party is already seated.” the waiter said, pointing to a group of people with large red menus in their hands who were talking loudly.
“We are not with them or any group,” Reb Dunzel stated bluntly and turned away from the table of unfamiliar faces.
“Really? You sure?” the waiter asked. An elegantly dressed woman who could have passed for a Russian princess looked up from her menu and winked at the Man with the Ladder.
“Are we sure?” the Man with the Ladder stammered, trying to reshuffle the wits that the wink had scrambled.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Reb Dunzel scolded, turning to the waiter. “If we were expecting company, or company was expecting us, I’m sure we’d be the first to know. This table for two here will suit us fine.” The waiter’s familiar manner cooled and he left them without saying a word to get some menus.
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel sat down at the small table. “Well, if nothing else, we’ll at least get a meal finally,” Reb Dunzel said to the Man with the Ladder, trying to get his attention.
A waitress in a long traditional Chinese gown appeared from behind a curtain and gracefully placed two large red menus and tea in real china cups on the table and disappeared again without saying a word. They were reaching for the menus when the grumpy-looking waiter came rushing up, “Sorry, mistake.” he said, collecting both the menus and cups and putting them to the side. He casually set down two plain glasses of tea and tossed two small smudged, graying menus on the table before disappearing behind the curtain.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that the waiter assumed we were part of that group?” Reb Dunzel asked the Man with the Ladder, as he noticed that the restaurant was empty except for themselves and the party of twelve.
“I can’t imagine anyone looking like they belong to that group.” the Man with the Ladder asserted. “No two people in that group look like they belong on the same continent, let alone at the same table.” One member of the group looked like an African chieftain, another looked like a Polynesian native, another like a Japanese businessman. In a cluster of men who temporarily rocked together as if they were dancing, a squat, very muscular, bull shaped man who looked like a Roumanian peasant bobbed his head up and down, and another, who looked like a school teacher kept time to some soundless music with his hand.
“They look like actors in an AT&T commercial” Reb Dunzel joked, a little nervously, “or like an advertisement for the United Nations.”
“I’ve never quite seen such a motley collection of dissimilar people,” the Man with the Ladder added, “but …”
Reb Dunzel completed his thought. “They are oddly familiar.”
The beautiful waitress in the long mandarin gown reappeared from behind the curtain carrying some elaborate dishes. She brought them to the group’s table and served each dish as if it were a gift, holding it high and bringing it down with a graceful dip of her lithe arms.
As impressive as the dishes were, the group’s reaction to them was even more remarkable. As if on cue, they leaned back in their seat, arched their eyebrows up, and mouthed a silent ‘oooh.’ Seeing the same expression on such different faces led Reb Dunzel to conclude the group must have something in common after all, but when he turned to point it out to the Man with the Ladder, he saw exactly the same expression on his friend’s face too and let the observation pass.
An impatient tap of a pencil on a pad signaled the return of their sour-faced waiter who now stood over them waiting for their order. Their menus offered only common, ordinary dishes and they hastily made their selection. The waiter dissappeared and, very quickly, the beautiful waitress appeared bringing food far exceeding anything they remembered ordering. They had seen banquets served at a few of their favorite restaurants and this food looked like the special dishes that were prepared long in advance for important people celebrating a special event. No sooner however, had the waitress ceremoniously set the dishes down in front of them then the waiter appeared and just as unceremoniously scooped up the plates.
“Mistake,” he said, and headed toward the kitchen hollering something in Chinese. After a moment he swiftly replaced the elaborate dishes with the very ordinary ones they had ordered. The contrast between the dishes they were eating and the food the group at the other table was enjoying tempered their appetite. They picked at the dishes in silence, their gaze wandering repeatedly to the elaborate arrangement of dishes at the group’s table. The woman who looked like a Russian Princess was telling a story.
“It shimmered white like freshly fallen snow,” she was saying, “and it was looking for …”
“… something very rare …” the Japanese businessman chimed in,
“… but wherever it looked …” added the Polynesian woman,
“… it found only the basics, food or shelter.” the African Chieftan said in a deep baritone.
The Man with the Ladder turned to Reb Dunzel, “Have you noticed how often …”
“… they finish each other’s sentences,” Reb Dunzel agreed, “How …”
“… extraordinary,” the Man with the Ladder concluded. He suddenly set down his chopsticks. “It gives me an idea for a story,” he said to Reb Dunzel.
Without any warning the group broke out in enthusiastic applause. The applause startled the Man with the Ladder who banged the saucer that held soy sauce against his dish of noodles, which startled Reb Dunzel, who whacked his chopsticks against his glass of tea. The effect was a room filled with noisy celebration. When the normal level of talk and rustling returned the Man with the Ladder leaned forward toward Reb Dunzel.
“It’s about them,” the Man with the Ladder said conspiratorially. He reached for a napkin to write down his idea for the story. As he and Reb Dunzel turned to sneak a glance at the subject of their new tale the group grew suddenly quiet and returned their glances with smiles that suggested that they knew exactly what Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder were thinking.
“A story lives by the characters it keeps,” Reb Dunzel pontificated in a whisper. “If we manage to weave a story around this bunch I think it would be a finale of a story.”
“I agree completely!” the African Chieftan said loudly, getting affirmative nods from all around the table though it wasn’t clear to Reb Dunzel or the Man with the Ladder what they were agreeing to. “I hope so,” the man who looked like the Roumanian peasant said loudly, “I sincerely hope so,” he added, “the cattle are starting to suffer.”
“Here’s the idea,” the Man with the Ladder said, leaning toward Reb Dunzel. “Suppose each person is part of a group.”
“But we are,” Reb Dunzel protested, “each of us is part of a group. You and I …”
“No, I mean suppose each of belongs to … in a very odd way … to a karass, a very unusual group.
“What’s a Karass?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“The name of the kind of group,” the Man with the Ladder said, a bit annoyed.
“Where did you come up with that name?” Reb Dunzel asked sharply, “it sounds foreign.”
“It just popped out of my memory,” his companion replied. “I probably read it somewhere. I don’t know, the name isn’t important.”
“You’re making this up as you go along aren’t you,” Reb Dunzel said suddenly.
The Man with the Ladder took the comment as a criticism. “You can jump in when you want,” he said.
“OK,” Reb Dunzel said enthusiastically, “perhaps you know a few of the members, but others stay unknown for a long time, perhaps you never meet them. This group gets together very infrequently because, no matter where they meet, most of the members have to travel long distances, and they come from all over and only some of the members show up at each meeting and you are never sure how many more members of the group you haven’t met.”
The Man with the Ladder picked up the idea. “And each of our fates is intertwined with the fates of others in this group in, in a crooked—in not a straightforward way,” he added. “In some way that isn’t clear to me yet anyway, we are tied to the other members of the group.”
“Your mean, if they win the lottery you get rich,” Reb Dunzel sniggered. The idea did not seem to make much sense to him.
“No, nothing that crude,” the Man with the Ladder said. “More like ideas or strong feelings of one member affects how the others feel and think. Their experiences color your experiences.”
“What good would such a group be?” Reb Dunzel asked, nibbling his Moo Shu pork. “I don’t see …”
“I’m not sure it’s any good, it’s just the way things are. Most of the time the group is just a set of individuals, going about their business, it’s just that occasionally you come up with a solution to a problem that you never faced, or feel great joy for a reason you can’t quite put your finger on, or feel like celebrating for no good reason, or mourn the loss of something or someone you can’t quite identify.”
“Look at the peculiar way the polyensian woman holds her chopsticks,” Reb Dunzel interrupted, trying to point to the woman surreptitiously with his chin. The woman unerringly unwound some noodles from a dish that resembled a mountain landscape onto her plate. “And everyone else at the table is holding their chopsticks in the same way” Reb Dunzel observed.
The Man with the Ladder glanced at Reb Dunzel who unknowingly gripped his chopsticks in the same peculiar way as the members of the group at the table and then hesitantly looked down and suddenly realized that he held his chopsticks in the same odd way.
Reb Dunzel Dunzel warmed to the idea of the Karass. “I’m think I get it,” he said. “Sometimes you seem to be thinking someone else’s thoughts entirely and sometimes you are joyful about a piece of luck that never happened to you personally. And occasionally,” the Man with the Ladder chimed in, “when a really sticky problem comes up the group gets together and tries to help, lend a hand—support and encouragement—but mostly, all of the action is at a distance.”
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel huddled together and began filling in the details of the story, plucking food from the plates in front of them as they talked. “We can make the story about a meeting of the karass, in a Hungarian Chinese restaurant,” the Man with the Ladder began the story, writing down his words on a napkin that he spread out in front of him.
“Why would the karass be meeting?” Reb Dunzel wanted to know.
“I’m not sure. Perhaps someone in the group had a problem that was disrupting all of their lives,” the Man with the Ladder said. From the group came a collective sigh and someone said, “yes, oh yes.”
“And maybe they decided it was a opportunity to celebrate the group also,” Reb Dunzel added. As the two writers sat in momentary silence waiting for the story’s ending to make its appearance, the people in the table in front of them ate noisily and maintained a vivid conversation. “They eat and talk at the same time,” Reb Dunzel noted as he stuck a dumpling in his mouth. “They seem to be able to be intensely engaged in an animated discussion at the same time as they pop the food in their mouths,” he said, chewing loudly.
At the table at which the group was assembled the stout man who resembled the Roumanian peasant stood up and waved a white cloth napkin. “It’s time for the vote,” the stout man said, “those in favor of … of … letting secrets go” he said dropping his voice.
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel watched as hands were raised. As they stared, the heavily set man who was apparently the leader of the group, looked at them expectantly.
After a moment Reb Dunzel raised his hand suddenly.
“What are you doing?” the Man with the Ladder asked.
“The ceiling,” Reb Dunzel answered, looking up. “Very unusual. There seems to be some odd decoration—there.” He pointed at the ceiling and waved his fingers.
The Man with the Ladder looked up and pointed at the ceiling. “Where?” he asked, “I don’t see anything.”
“There,” Reb Dunzel said loudly aiming his thumb at a spot above them.
“I think I see it,” the Man with the Ladder remarked tilting his hand towards the spot Reb Dunzel indicated and waving it around. “Very odd.”
“Ok,” the stout man said, “no spectacles.”
The hands went down. “It’s unanimous then. We can leave the final details to Emily,” he declared and sat down. The group returned to the task of cleaning off the last few plates that still had food on them.
The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel struggled with the story. It seemed to get complicated calling for more scribbling on more napkins until they had exhausted the supply of napkins on their table. The Man with the Ladder motioned in desperation to the waiter waving the last whole napkin at him. “Napkins for wiping not writing,” the waiter said caustically, as he laid a handful of the bright while sheets on the table. “You should have a book,” he said.
After a while, the group in front of them laid down their chopsticks reluctantly and turned to the issue of farewells, shaking hands and brushing scraps of food from their companions shirts and blouses. Each of them waved to the Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel as they walked, gay and animated, to the exit. “Now that you’ve been here and voted, we’ll see you next time,” one of them said. As the short, stocky man walked past them he looked at the Man with the Ladder and remarked, “just remember you voted for it,” adding, “it’s a big responsibility.”
After the last member of the group had left, they sat in silence working on the story.
“The ending is weak,” Reb Dunzel complained.
“Ending? What ending?” the Man with the Ladder asked mystified. He sorted through the jigsaw puzzle of story pieces on the napkins, “I only see the beginning of a story that’s so long it droops over the middle. Maybe if we stretch it out a little longer, and wave it around a bit no one will notice there’s no ending at all.”
As they sat there trying to finish the story, a woman burst into the restaurant. She was a good approximation of a recurring dream that Reb Dunzel had, a ravishing beauty, exotic and yet familiar, dressed to as she was always dressed in his dream. She rushed toward them. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she announced, grabbing a chair to join them,”Where are the others?”
In his re-occurring dream it was always at the point where he needed to speak that Reb Dunzel would suddenly become mute and grunt and groan and scare away the woman of his dreams. He could feel his throat closing, unable to swallow. He turned to the Man with the Ladder in hopes that he might rescue him from the necessity of speaking, but the arrival of the woman had so startled the Man with the Ladder that he had dropped his chopsticks and he was bent under the table trying to find them.
“Th-th-they-left.” Reb Dunzel finally managed to stammer out.
“Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll join you.” the woman said sitting down, “I’m famished.”
The waitress cleared their table of their half eaten dishes and set a red menu down. Reb Dunzel and the Man with the Ladder tried not to look obvious as they attempted to peek at the contents as the woman opened the menu to select her dishes but all they could see before she quickly closed the red folder and put it down, was that it was hand written in a flowing script.
The woman looked very European, maybe Hungarian, Reb Dunzel thought, but she spoke to the waitress in what sounded like Chinese and yet was so soft and melodious that Reb Dunzel could not remember ever having heard Chinese spoken that way. It appeared she was talking to her more like an old friend and about more then just what she was ordering for she gestured frequently and the waitress giggled a few times looking directly at Reb Dunzel.
“Was it interesting?” she asked.
“I’m afraid …” Reb Dunzel said, “I’m afraid we did not …”
“Of course. It was a spur of the moment thing but it seemed the only way. No one was even sure until …” she opened a notebook book she was carrying and turned a page. “That’s why I was late.” She interrupted what she was saying and glanced at the napkins spread on the table.
“Writing, of course. Good. She took out a brightly colored pen and opened the book and wrote something quickly. Then she slid the pen into the holder attached to the book and closed it. “What’s it about. Wait let me guess,” she said, “it’s about the group.”
The Man with the Ladder wanted to ask about the group but hesitated.
“More or less,” the Man with the Ladder said. “It’s about …. It’s hard to explain what its about exactly. It’s about …” Just then the waitress appeared with the food. The Man with the Ladder and Reb Dunzel stared at the plates before them.
“Won’t you join me,” the woman asked as she wielded her chopsticks elegantly. They ate in silence for a while before she spoke again.
“You were about to tell me the story.” Reb Dunzel could not resist. He put down the chopsticks and began telling what they had worked out of the story.
“Oh yes,” she said, “yes. It sounds like something Grisses would say. How does it end?” she asked.
Reb Dunzel arranged himself to deliver the unwritten ending. “Well, they …”
“Oh dear,” the woman said suddenly. “Oh dear.” She looked up towards the front of the restaurant and stood up suddenly. “Look at the time. I’ve done my part, delivered … I must … I’m sorry,” she said to Reb Dunzel, “I must … ” and she ran out leaving the Man with the Ladder with a shrimp perched in his mouth, undecided whether he should spit or swallow. She was gone before either the Man with the Ladder or Reb Dunzel could manage a farewell.
“See you soon,” she cried as she maneuvered through the door.
They sat in silence for a while feeling the woman’s absence. The waiter stirred but they glared at him and he thought better of whatever he was thinking. “It would be a crime to waste this,” they muttered as they cleaned off the plates. After they had finished the last morsel of food, they collected the scraps of napkins and the Man with the Ladder stuffed some of the sheets into his pocket and Reb Dunzel was trying to put the pieces next to him in some sort of an order so that he could work on his part of the story, when they noticed that the woman had left the notebook on the table.
They motioned to the waiter for the bill, hoping in the face of common sense that they might run out an catch the woman.
“All paid,” the waiter said. “No charge. Except for the tip perhaps,” he added hopefully. They counted out a good tip and hesitated. “Should we leave the book with him in case she comes back for it?” Reb Dunzel asked.
“I don’t think we should,” the Man with the Ladder said. “Perhaps her name is in it.” He picked up the notebook and opened it. On the first page there was that days date and their two names and under their names a list of other names none of which seemed familiar to him. “I don’t think we should,” the Man with the Ladder said. “I think I have an ending for the final story of our book,” the Man with the Ladder, said, opening the book and taking the pen from the little holder the woman had placed it in. “It’s not an ending exactly,” he said, “more a temporary stop,” and he leaned back to make the first entry in the book.