American Stranger Read online

  American Stranger

  A Novel

  David Plante

  I … am amazed by the horrible homelessness all

  French-Canadians in America have.…

  —Jack Kerouac

  One

  Alone in her parents’ Manhattan apartment, Nancy walked around naked. Closed up for the month of August while she and her parents had been in Amagansett, the apartment was still and dim and hot, the dark green, old-fashioned blinds pulled almost all the way down to the windowsills.

  She raised a blind and looked out over the traffic on Fifth Avenue and the massed trees of the park beyond, then she turned to look about the living room as if for someone who might be there. The living room appeared enormous to her. The parquet floor was bare, the rugs rolled up and pushed against a wall. Arranged at right angles to the sofa and armchairs were two Biedermeier chairs and a Biedermeier table, their delicate legs reflected in the highly polished floor, and at the end of the room was a tall, narrow Biedermeier cabinet, of cherrywood with ebony rosette inlays along a pediment held by two thin ebony columns, this piece of furniture, too, reflected in the floor. Nancy walked barefoot across the floor. The air smelled of beeswax and, in light whiffs, naphthalene.

  She went to her bedroom, where on the wall-to-wall carpet lay her open valise and, by it, department-store bags with the clothes she’d bought still in them. She stretched out on her unmade bed, the white satin spread thrown down to the foot. It seemed to her she heard a dull thump somewhere in the apartment, and she went rigid, listening. It didn’t reoccur, but the silence seemed to have its own sound, and, rigid still, she listened to this. Slowly, she got up and put on the dressing gown taken from the back of a chair, and, with a faint tingling throughout her, she went out into the hallway to look into her mother and father’s bedroom, to make sure there was no one but herself in the apartment. Back in her room, she sat on the edge of her bed for a while, motionless.

  On her bedside table was a white telephone. She wanted to call someone, but about everyone she thought of calling, she thought, no, not him. She called her mother in Amagansett.

  In her low voice, her mother said, “You’ll be careful, please, driving back to Boston.”

  “I’ll drive carefully, but very fast.”

  Her mother said, “Yes,” and sighed a little.

  Nancy wandered again around the apartment, looking for someone who was not, she knew, there. She was always looking for what was not there.

  Back in the living room, she examined, on the mantelpiece of the fireplace, two ice pails that had been on the mantelpiece for as long as she could remember. They were Berlin porcelain, brought from Berlin by her mother’s parents when they came to New York as refugees, and for a moment she wondered if for them these reminders of life in Berlin still hurt. At the sides of the buckets were golden lions’ heads biting on golden rings; on their fronts were perspective views, one of a country road and trees with tiny people seen from the back wearing black and red clothes, and the other of a palace and a square before it with tiny figures in red and black, also seen from the back. Nancy’s parents didn’t talk about Berlin, or maybe she did not want to hear about Berlin. Or, maybe, her parents didn’t want her to know.

  She was, she told herself, a spoiled girl who did everything she could to be light-spirited, if not superficial. And though her parents would have denied this, she felt they encouraged her to be spoiled and light-spirited, even, she accused herself, superficial. They may have sighed at her behavior, but they seemed pleased by her daring, for they had bought her a sleek sports car.

  If she wanted a different life from the life they could offer her, they supported her in wanting that different life. They worried if she went into one of her dark moods and stayed closed up in her room, as if she did this because of them. She tried to reassure them that her dark moods had nothing to do with them, who were too indulgent of her, their only child, and for their sakes she was light-spirited, even, yes, superficial; but they still felt they were at fault for her moods. She herself had no idea where these moods came from, any more than she knew what she was always looking for.

  She had a long weekend before leaving for Boston, and felt restless, without knowing just what she was restless about.

  She wanted to call someone, but about everyone she thought of calling, she decided, no, not him. She yawned and stretched out her arms. I know the person I want to call, she thought; I want to call Vinnie Tasso. He was her former colleague from a summer internship in a publishing house.

  He said he didn’t feel like going out.

  “Oh, come on, Vinnie.”

  “Oh, come on, Vinnie. Oh, come on, Vinnie. Oh, come on, Vinnie.” He whined. “Everyone is always telling me, oh, come on, Vinnie.”

  “Come on, Vinnie.”

  “All right, all right.”

  She went to him just after dark.

  Vinnie lived in a small apartment in Chelsea with a view of a ginkgo tree in the streetlight. He did layout for a glossy magazine; a brick wall was covered with overlapping layout sheets and photographs with blocks of text and lines drawn zigzagging across them, and an electric fan, turning from side to side, made the sheets flutter. Vinnie was thin and short and sexless, even in his own view of himself, but he didn’t seem to mind this. He was, he himself said, more social than sexual.

  He opened a bottle of sparkling white wine and, handing Nancy a glass, asked her what she’d done in Amagansett over the summer. She said he wouldn’t be interested, and he said she was right, he wouldn’t be.

  “Then let’s not sit here,” Nancy said. “Let’s finish the wine and go to your bar.”

  “Why is it that you need me to take you to the bar?”

  “So you can introduce me to your friends.”

  “You’ve already met everyone I know there who could possibly be of any interest to you, and they weren’t of any interest.”

  “You didn’t make any new friends over the summer?”

  “I made a lot a friends, but none of them would interest you.”

  “Why don’t you leave that to me?”

  The bar, in the West Village, had a dance floor in strobe lights where young men and women danced together or alone, and around the dance floor were cloth-covered tables, waiters in black vests.

  Nancy danced with Vinnie, who said she was a bad dancer. He was right, but she was equal to anyone around her in the pleasure she took from the place. Swaying her hips, she raised her hands high and snapped her fingers and laughed. She was tall, and had long, loose, light russet hair and pale brown eyes, and her almost matte white skin was freckled across her delicate, bony chin and cheeks. She was wearing a long, full red dress with tiny embossed medallions sewn along the bodice, and on her long, narrow feet red espadrilles laced up, criss-cross, above her ankles.

  Back at their table with Vinnie, she looked at the dancers in the strobe light that made them disappear and appear, disappear and appear, lit in different positions.

  Nancy asked, “Who’s that?”

  “Who?”

  “There, standing at the bar, wearing chinos and a Columbia University sweatshirt.”

  The guy standing at the bar had very short black hair, and his black beard shadowed the taut white skin of his angular face. The wide collar of his sweatshirt revealed his muscular neck, which appeared, in itself, to expose all his muscular body. Black chest hair curled above the ribbed collar. The corners of his mouth curved in a slight, fixed smile; he looked around at everyone and at no one with large black eyes.

  “That’s Aaron,” Vinnie said.

  “Aaron?”

 
“Aaron Cohen.”

  “Let me guess. He’s Jewish,” Nancy said.

  Vinnie said, “You’re really good at picking up on names.”

  When, again, she looked at the guy at the bar, he turned his back toward her. He leaned on the bar, and his broad shoulder blades stretched the cloth of the sweatshirt.

  Vinnie said, “He’s not just Jewish; he comes from a really strict Hasidic family in the Bronx.”

  “That guy, standing there, comes from a Hasidic family?”

  Vinnie, who liked to think he knew everything about everyone, said he knew everything about Aaron: he was brought up to let his forelocks grow in long curls, to wear a black overcoat, a black skull cap and a black fedora, and black trousers with a very low crotch, and all those shawls and strings tied around him under his black jacket—the whole bit.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really and truly. He used to have to do things I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of.”

  “Like what?”

  “You ask me? Everybody knows what a Catholic has to do. A Catholic has to practice sexual abstinence, that’s what a Catholic has to do. I don’t know what Aaron had to do. Anyway, he gave it all up.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why does he come here?”

  “I think he comes here because it’s as far from Hasidic Jews as he can get.”

  “Does he ever pick up a girl?”

  “I’ve only ever seen him go off on his own.”

  “Does he at least talk with anyone?”

  “What he does is he stands at the bar and drinks beer and looks around, and if he thinks anyone is looking at him he looks away.”

  Aaron Cohen’s shoulder blades moved under his sweatshirt whenever he raised his bottle of beer or lowered it.

  Vinnie slouched in his bentwood chair while searching the bar, it seemed, for someone else, anyone but Aaron Cohen.

  “You don’t want me to meet him,” Nancy said.

  Half smiling, Vinnie said, “I’d like to know what you expect from him.”

  “For Christ’s sake, what do you think I expect from him?”

  “I don’t know, but why do you want to meet him unless you expect something from him?”

  “Come on, go talk with him and bring him back.”

  “Aaron doesn’t talk much.”

  “How do you know him, if he doesn’t talk?”

  “He talks with me because I talk with him, the way I talk with everybody.”

  “Come on, I’d like to meet him.”

  Vinnie slouched back on his chair and only after a while lurched forward and said, “Oh all right,” and got up, his long, thin neck, torso, and legs swaying. He went to the bar to order drinks from the bartender and, as if incidentally, started to talk with Aaron, whose head turned sideways, so the light from behind the bar showed up his neck. When Nancy saw Vinnie nod toward her, she knew he was asking Aaron to come to their table. Aaron stood back from the bar to look in her direction, and she quickly glanced over her shoulder to see if there was anybody behind her. But there was no one. The table behind her was empty. She turned back to Aaron, who was walking toward the table with Vinnie.

  He had clear features, and though his beard showed he appeared to have just shaved because his skin was slightly glossy. As Vinnie introduced him to Nancy, he smiled more, but he didn’t seem to know what to do until Vinnie said, “Sit,” and he drew the sleeves of his sweatshirt further up his forearms before he sat, then he smiled at Nancy and said, in a low voice, “Hi,” and she said, “Hi,” and she smiled, too. Nancy liked his smile.

  Vinnie helped her, as he always did. He sat between her and Aaron and said to Aaron, “Don’t ask Nancy to dance. She’s a terrible dancer.”

  “I don’t know how to dance,” Aaron said.

  Standing, Vinnie said, “Then you both have a lot to say to each other, so I’m going to make the rounds.”

  “Stay with us, Vinnie,” Aaron said.

  Tapping him on the head, Vinnie said, “You still think it’s wrong to sit with a woman, do you?” He picked up his drink and left.

  The strange sense occurred to Nancy of someone standing behind her, about to grab her; the sense was strange and at the same time familiar: she felt that someone, or something, was always there behind her and about to grab her, and when it occurred it startled her. Pulling away, she hit her hip against the edge of the round table and her cocktail splashed in its glass.

  “Are you all right?” Aaron asked.

  Laughing a loud laugh, Nancy thought how sometimes she could almost be vulgar when she was loud. She pressed a hand to the base of her throat to repress her loudness. “I’m all right.” But she was still startled.

  Aaron’s shoulders sank a little as he resigned himself to staying with her until she said he could go, or so Nancy thought. If he was a Hasid, she didn’t know what he felt about a woman sitting next to him in a bar. But what he felt was up to him, not her, because he had his reasons for coming to the bar and he could have made some excuse and got up and left her if he wanted to. Still, it was strange that he was a good-looking Hasid in a sweatshirt drinking beer from a bottle while she sipped at her Manhattan.

  “Where do you live?” Nancy asked him.

  “On the Upper West Side. And you, where do you live?”

  “On the Upper East Side.”

  Aaron nodded.

  Well, they’d got that far, but Nancy didn’t know how to go further, so they both looked at the dancers in the strobe light.

  She asked, “Is it true that you don’t know how to dance?”

  “I’ve never tried.”

  This offered her a chance, but she felt too disoriented to take it. She said, “Well, Vinnie is right, I’m a terrible dancer. You wouldn’t learn anything from me.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’m not really interested in learning to dance.”

  “Then I could ask you what you are interested in.”

  Now he laughed, and she knew he wouldn’t say, and she asked herself if she was really interested in him. No, not really. He was too strange, at least for her. She’d never met an ex-Hasid before; she wondered if she’d ever met a Hasid, however often she’d seen them walking up and down West Forty-Seventh Street. In their business, they were supposed to carry in their heavy overcoats millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds and gold, or so she’d heard. But she couldn’t see Aaron in that way. She couldn’t see him in any way. And she thought she’d like to leave.

  She said, “I guess I’d better go,” and she stood and he, too, stood, which she thought was polite of him, and as she walked to the exit he followed, which was even more polite. Instead of stopping at the door to say goodbye, Aaron opened the door and waited for her to go out onto the sidewalk, and he went out with her. She could have said goodbye to him then, but, disoriented, she walked on, and because he followed her she stopped and waited for him to stop beside her. She asked herself, What’s going on? He was looking out at the traffic in the street, as if he were alone. And there came to Nancy the feeling that she, too, was alone, that if there was anything between them, it was that they were both alone against whatever it was that pulled them both from behind. She asked, “What about walking together for a while?” and he turned to her the smile she had liked and he said, “I’d like that.”

  There was tenderness in Aaron’s angular face, and he looked at her as if he were waiting for her to decide which direction they’d take. She noticed that his black eyebrows almost met over his nose.

  Nancy shook her long hair and said, “I like New York when it’s hot.”

  They walked by people sitting on the steep steps to high stoops and the open front doors of narrow brick town houses, the street filled with shadows cast by streetlights through the trees. Though the air was still, the sultry stillnes
s seemed within itself to be restless and about to break out in wild, dance-like movements. A greater sense of restlessness was about to break out into wild movement in the traffic and pedestrians along wide Fourteenth Street, where stores opened onto the sidewalk. They crossed Fourteenth Street to walk up Eighth Avenue, where the cars and the people were congested as if for a carnival, or for a carnival that everyone had come for but that hadn’t yet begun, the dancing already promised in the honking of car horns and people yelling. Nancy and Aaron walked past a man playing a saxophone and a woman tap-dancing on a sheet of plywood.

  When they were passing the Port Authority building, Aaron asked Nancy if she was tired and would like him to hail a taxi.

  “I’d like to go on walking,” she said. “And you?”

  He raised a shoulder and let it drop, then said, “I like walking,” and Nancy smiled a little at what she thought was the Jewishness of his gesture and his intonation.

  She didn’t mind what direction they took, a direction that, it seemed to her, was taken for them by New York.

  They crossed Forty-Second Street, and went on up Eighth Avenue to Columbus Circle, walking over gratings from which hot and fetid air blew up, sometimes with tiny birds’ feathers, and in the shafts below the gratings were dark spaces that were lit by the burning, dim bare bulbs down there. The sidewalks were packed with people, the avenue jammed with traffic, and it seemed that the restlessness in the hot night would be, if it did break out into movement, violent, and there was an exciting expectation even in this. Nancy wanted something to happen, and she felt that New York on a hot night would make it happen.

  A police car, its siren wailing, raced round Columbus Circle.

  On the other side of Columbus Circle, Central Park West was almost empty of pedestrians and traffic. On one side of the avenue were the illuminated lobbies of the apartment houses seen through open doors, the doormen standing just outside for the coolness that came from the park across the avenue, beyond the blackened granite wall, where lights shone here and there among the dark trees.