“You got the paper, man?”
“Right here.” I deal it off the stack. “Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Six pages. That’s $21, minus the five you already gave me is $16 you owe me.”
“Wait, man.” He sits down beside me on the steps. “I got to read this fucker first, right? How I know you did a righteous job if I don’t read it?”
I watch him as he reads. Somehow I expect him to be moving his lips, to be stumbling over the unfamiliar words, but no, his eyes flicker rapidly over the lines. He gnaws his lip. He reads faster and faster, impatiently turning the pages. At length he looks at me and there is death in his eyes.
“This is shit, man,” he says. “I mean, this here is just shit. What kind of con you trying to pull?”
“I guarantee you’ll get a B+. You don’t have to pay me until you get the grade. Anything less than B+ and—”
“No, listen to me. Who talking about grades? I can’t turn this fucking thing in at all. Look, half this thing is jive-talk, the other half it copied straight out of some book. Crazy shit, that’s what. The prof he going to read it, he going to look at me, he going to say, Lumumba, who you think I am? You think I a dummy, Lumumba? You didn’t write this crap, he going to say to me. You don’t believe Word One of this.” Angrily he rises. “Here, I going to read you some of this, man. I show you what you give me.” Leafing through the pages, he scowls, spits, shakes his head. “No. Why the hell should I? You know what you up to here, man? You making fun of me, that’s what. You playing games with the dumb nigger, man.”
“I was trying to make it look plausible that you had written—”
“Crap. You pulling a mindfuck, man. You making up a pile of stinking Jew shit about Europydes and you hoping I get in trouble trying to pass it off as my own stuff.”
“That’s a lie. I did the best possible job for you, and don’t think I didn’t sweat plenty. When you hire another man to write a term paper for you, I think you have to be prepared to expect a certain—”
“How long this take you? Fifteen minutes?”
“Eight hours, maybe ten,” I say. “You know what I think you’re trying to do, Lumumba? You’re pulling reverse racism on me. Jew this and Jew that—if you dislike Jews so much, why didn’t you get a black to write your paper for you? Why didn’t you write it yourself? I did an honest job for you. I don’t like hearing it put down as stinking Jew shit. And I tell you that if you turn it in, you’ll get a passing grade for sure, you’ll probably get a B+ at the very least.”
“I gonna get flunked, is what.”
“No. No. Maybe you just don’t see what I was driving at. Let me try to explain it to you. If you’ll give it to me for a minute so I can read you a couple of things—maybe it’ll be clearer if I—” Getting to my feet, I extend a hand toward the paper, but he grins and holds it high above my head. I’d need a ladder to reach it. No use jumping. “Come on, damn it, don’t play games with me! Let me have it!” I snap, and he flicks his wrist and the six sheets of paper soar into the wind and go sailing eastward along College Walk. Dying, I watch them go. I clench my fists; an astonishing burst of rage explodes in me. I want to smash his mocking face in. “You shouldn’t have done that.” I say. “You shouldn’t have just thrown it away.”
“You owe me my five bucks back, man.”
“Hold on, now. I did the work you hired me to do, and—”
“You said you don’t charge if the paper’s no good. Okay, the paper was shit. No charge. Give me the five.”
“You aren’t playing fair, Lumumba. You’re trying to rip me off.”
“Who ripping who off? Who set up that money-back deal anyhow? Me? You. What I gonna do for a term paper now? I got to take an incomplete and it your fault. Suppose they make me ineligible for the team because of that. Huh? Huh? What then? Look, man, you make me want to puke. Give me the five.”
Is he serious about the refund? I can’t tell. The idea of paying him back disgusts me, and it isn’t just on account of losing the money. I wish I could read him, but I can’t get anything out of him on that level; I’m completely blocked now. I’ll bluff. I say, “What is this, slavery turned upside down? I did the work. I don’t give a damn what kind of crazy irrational reasons you’ve got for rejecting it. I’m going to keep the five. At least the five.”
“Give me the money, man.”
“Go to hell.”
I start to walk away. He grabs me—his arm, fully outspread toward me, must be as long as one of my legs—and hauls me toward him. He starts to shake me. My teeth are rattling. His grin is broader than ever, but his eyes are demonic. I wave my fists at him, but, held at arm’s length, I can’t even touch him. I start to yell. A crowd is gathering. Suddenly there are three or four other men in varsity jackets surrounding us, all black, all gigantic, though not as big as he is. His teammates. Laughing, whooping, cavorting. I am a toy to them. “Hey, man, he bothering you?” one of them asks. “You need help, Yahya?” yells another. “What’s the mothafuck honkie doing to you, man?” calls a third. They form a ring and Lumumba thrusts me toward the man on his left, who catches me and flings me onward around the circle. I spin; I stumble; I reel; they never let me fall. Around and around and around. An elbow explodes against my lip. I taste blood. Someone slaps me, and my head rockets backward. Fingers jabbing my ribs. I realize that I’m going to get very badly hurt, that in fact these giants are going to beat me up. A voice I barely recognize as my own offers Lumumba his refund, but no one notices. They continue to whirl me from one to the next. Not slapping now, not jabbing, but punching. Where are the campus police? Help! Help! Pigs to the rescue! But no one comes. I can’t catch my breath. I’d like to drop to my knees and huddle against the ground. They’re yelling at me, racial epithets, words I barely comprehend, soul-brother jargon that must have been invented last week; I don’t know what they’re calling me, but I can feel the hatred in every syllable. Help? Help? The world spins wildly. I know now how a basketball would feel, if a basketball could feel. The steady pounding, the blur of unending motion. Please, someone, anyone, help me, stop them. Pain in my chest: a lump of white-hot metal back of my breast-bone. I can’t see. I can only feel. Where are my feet? I’m falling at last. Look how fast the steps rush toward me. The cold kiss of the stone bruises my cheek. I may already have lost consciousness; how can I tell? There’s one comfort, at least. I can’t get any further down than this.
TWENTY-TWO.
He was ready to fall in love when he met Kitty, overripe and eager for an emotional entanglement. Perhaps that was the whole trouble; what he felt for her was not so much love as simply satisfaction at the idea of being in love. Or perhaps not. He never understood his feelings for Kitty in any orderly way. They had their romance in the summer of 1963, which he remembers as the last summer of hope and good cheer before the long autumn of entropic chaos and philosophical despair descended on western society. Jack Kennedy was running things then, and while things weren’t going especially well for him politically, he still managed to give the impression that he was going to get it all together, if not right away then in his inevitable second term. Atmospheric nuclear tests had just been banned. The Washington-to-Moscow hot line was being set up. Secretary of State Rusk announced in August that the South Vietnamese government was rapidly taking control of additional areas of the countryside. The number of Americans killed fighting in Vietnam had not yet reached 100.
Selig, who was 28 years old, had just moved from his Brooklyn Heights apartment to a small place in the West Seventies. He was working as a stockbroker then, of all unlikely things. This was Tom Nyquist’s idea. After six years, Nyquist was still his closest and possibly only friend, although the friendship had waned considerably in the last year or two: Nyquist’s almost arrogant self-assurance made Selig increasingly more uncomfortable, and he found it desirable to put some distance, psychological and geographical, between himself and the older man. One day Selig had said wistfully that if he could only manage to get a bu
ndle of money together—say, $25,000 or so—he’d go off to a remote island and spend a couple of years writing a novel, a major statement about alienation in contemporary life, something like that. He had never written anything serious and wasn’t sure he was sincere about wanting to. He was secretly hoping that Nyquist would simply hand him the money—Nyquist could pick up $25,000 in one afternoon’s work, if he felt like it—and say, “Here, chum, go and be creative.” But Nyquist didn’t do things that way. Instead he said that the easiest way for someone without capital to make a lot of money in a hurry was to take a job as a customer’s man with a brokerage firm. The commissions would be decent, enough to live on and something left over, but the real money would come from riding along on all the in-shop maneuvers of the experienced brokers—the short sales, the new-issue purchases, the arbitrage ploys. If you’re dedicated enough, Nyquist told him, you can make just about as much as you like. Selig protested that he knew nothing about Wall Street. “I could teach you everything in three days,” said Nyquist.
Actually it took less than that. Selig slipped into Nyquist’s mind for a quick cram course in financial terminology. Nyquist had all the definitions beautifully arranged: common stocks and preferred, shorts and longs, puts and calls, debentures, convertibles, capital gains, special situations, closed-end versus open-end funds, secondary offerings, specialists and what they do, the over-the-counter market, the Dow-Jones averages, point-and-figure charts, and everything else. Selig memorized all of it. There was a vivid quality about mind-to-mind transferences with Nyquist that made memorizing things easy. The next step was to enroll as a trainee. Every big brokerage firm was looking for beginners—Merrill Lynch, Goodbody, Hayden Stone, Clark Dodge, scads of them. Selig picked one at random and applied. They gave him a stock-market quiz by way of preliminary screening; he knew most of the answers, and those he didn’t know he picked up out of the minds of his fellow testees, most of whom had been following the market since childhood. He got a perfect score and was hired. After a brief training period he passed the licensing test, and before long he was a registered representative operating out of a fairly new brokerage office on Broadway near 72nd Street.
He was one of five brokers, all of them fairly young. The clientele was predominantly Jewish and generally geriatric: 75-year-old widows from the huge apartment houses along 72nd Street, and cigar-chomping retired garment manufacturers who lived on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. Some of them had quite a lot of money, which they invested in the most cautious way possible. Some were practically penniless, but insisted on buying four shares of Con Edison or three shares of Telephone just to have the illusion of prosperity. Since most of the clients were elderly and didn’t work, the bulk of dealings at the office were transacted in person rather than by phone; there were always ten or twelve senior citizens schmoozing in front of the stock ticker, and now and then one of them would dodder to the desk of his pet broker and place an order. On Selig’s fourth day at work one venerable client suffered a fatal heart attack during a nine-point rally. Nobody seemed surprised or even dismayed, neither the brokers nor the friends of the victim: customers died in the shop about once a month, Selig learned. Kismet. You come to expect your friends to drop dead, once you reach a certain age. He quickly became a favorite, especially among the old ladies; they liked him because he was a nice Jewish boy, and several offered to introduce him to comely granddaughters. These offers he always refused, but politely; he made a point of being courteous and patient with them, of playing grandson. Most of them were ignorant, practically illiterate women, kept in a state of lifelong innocence by their hard-driving, acquisitive, coronary-prone husbands; now, having inherited more money than they could possibly spend, they had no real idea of how to manage it, and were wholly dependent on the nice young broker. Probing their minds, Selig found them almost always to be dim and sadly unformed—how could you live to the age of 75 without ever having had an idea?—but a few of the livelier ladies showed vigorous, passionate peasant rapacity, charming in its way. The men were less agreeable—loaded with dough, yet always on the lookout for more. The vulgarity and ferocity of their ambitions repelled him, and he glanced into their minds no more often than necessary, merely probing to have a better idea of their investment goals so he could serve them as they would be served. A month among such people, he decided, would be sufficient to turn a Rockefeller into a socialist.
Business was steady but unspectacular; once he had acquired his own nucleus of regulars, Selig’s commissions ran to about $160 a week, which was more money than he had ever made before, but hardly the kind of income he imagined brokers pulled down. “You’re lucky you came here in the spring,” one of the other customer’s men told him. “In the winter months all the clients go to Florida and we can choke before anybody gives us any business here.” As Nyquist had predicted, he was able to turn some pleasant profits by trading for his own account; there were always nice little deals circulating in the office, hot tips with substance behind them. He started with savings of $350 and quickly pyramided his wad to a high four-figure sum, making money on Chrysler and Control Data and RCA and Sunray DX Oil, nimbly trading in and out on rumors of mergers, stock splits, or dynamic earnings gains; but he discovered that Wall Street runs in two directions, and much of his winnings melted away through badly timed trades in Brunswick, Beckman Instruments, and Martin Marietta. He came to see that he was never going to have enough of a stake to go off and write that novel. Possibly just as well: did the world need another amateur novelist? He wondered what he would do next. After three months as a broker he had some money in the bank, but not much, and he was hideously bored.
Luck delivered Kitty to him. She came in one muggy July morning at half past nine. The market hadn’t opened yet, most of the customers had fled to the Catskills for the summer, and the only people in the office were Martinson, the manager, Nadel, one of the other customer’s men, and Selig. Martinson was going over his totals, Nadel was on the phone to somebody downtown trying to work a complicated finagle in American Photocopy, and Selig, idle, was daydreaming of falling in love with somebody’s beautiful granddaughter. Then the door opened and somebody’s beautiful granddaughter came in. Not exactly beautiful, maybe, but certainly attractive: a girl in her early twenties, slim and well proportioned, perhaps five feet three or four, with fluffy light-brown hair, blue-green eyes, finely outlined features, a graceful slender figure. She seemed shy, intelligent, somehow innocent, a curious mixture of knowledge and naiveté. She wore a white silk blouse—gold chain lying on the smallish breasts—and an ankle-length brown skirt, offering a hint of excellent legs beneath. No, not a beautiful girl, but certainly pretty. Refreshing to look at. What the hell, Selig wondered, does she want in this temple of Mammon at her age? She’s here fifty years too early. Curiosity led him to send a probe drilling into her forehead as she walked toward him. Seeking only surface stuff: name, age, marital status, address, telephone number, purpose of visit—what else?
He got nothing.
That shocked him. It was an incredible experience. Unique. To reach toward a mind and find it absolutely inaccessible, opaque, hidden as if behind an impenetrable wall—he had never had that happen to him before. He got no aura from her at all. She might as well have been a department store’s plaster window mannequin, or a mindless robot from another planet. He sat there blinking, trying to account for his failure to make contact. He was so astounded by her total blankness that he forgot to listen to what she was saying to him, and had to ask her to repeat.
“I said, I’d like to open a brokerage account. Are you a broker?”
Sheepish, fumbling, stricken with sudden adolescent clumsiness, he gave her the new-account forms. By this time the other brokers had arrived, but too late: by the rules of the house she was his client. Sitting beside his cluttered desk, she told him of her investment needs while he studied the elegant tapered structure of her high-bridged nose, fought without success against her perplexing and enigmati
c mental inaccessibility, and, despite or perhaps because of that inaccessibility, felt himself helplessly falling in love with her.
She was 22, one year out of Radcliffe, came from Long Island, and shared a West End Avenue apartment with two other girls. Unmarried—there had been a long futile love affair ending in a broken engagement not long before, he would discover later. (How strange it was for him not to be discovering everything at once, taking the information as he desired it.) Her background was in mathematics and she worked as a computer programmer, a term which, in 1963, meant very little to him; he wasn’t sure whether she designed computers, operated them, or repaired them. Recently she had inherited $6500 from an aunt in Arizona, and her parents, who evidently were stern and formidable advocates of sink-or-swim education, had told her to invest the money on her own, by way of assuming adult responsibilities. So she had gone to her friendly neighborhood brokerage office, a lamb for the shearing, to invest her money. “What do you want?” Selig asked her. “To stash it away in safe blue chips, or to go for a little action, a chance for capital gains?”