Page 100 of Playworld

Shel took this advice to heart. After a miserable week with his head buried in manuals and his own cribbed notes, fourteen-hour days of trial and mostly error in which he destroyed countless rolls of film, he regrouped after they made landfall in Europe, wandering the Rock of Gibraltar to shoot all day and then, determined not to make a mistake, walked himself step by step through the entire process—negatives to contact sheet to prints—without a single disaster. Lewis was right:something was always happening.Shel merely had to decide what it would be. It was the best job on the boat because he was free—not just of the punishing schedule but the navy itself. At ports of call, theDaisy May’s staff rarely wanted something specific, so Shel gave himself license to roam, to draw up his own itineraries, daring himself to see as much as possible: in Italy, Vatican City, the Teatro di Marcello, the open-air markets between Via del Corso and the Pantheon; in Greece he scaled the Acropolis, took day hops to the Aegean’s countless islands, their names like seabirds—Skiros, Chios, Ikaria—photographing the shopkeepers and fishmongers, the beggar children with the countenances of old men. The occasional, blessed moment after taking a picture—the purely instinctual sense in the microsecond after the shutter clicked—that he’dgotsomething. And later, his confidence growing as the image, like a genie summoned from smoke, magically delineated and then affixed in the developing tray. The job gave him access to every part of the boat, engine room to command tower. Riding out a storm on theDes Moines’s bridge, the ship climbed a forty-foot swell, the wave’s face filling the windows, pushing the prow briefly airborne, and, after tilting over the crest, after a fall during which Shel could feel his stomach float, it cleaved the water, sending great spumes exploding up the hull, as if the vessel were a broadsword. From a helicopter, during war games—the closest they’d ever get to battle—he photographed theDes Moinesfrom several thousand feet: the water beneath the turrets smoothed to glass when the guns fired, the molten clouds billowed brightly from the barrels, and then the aftershock arrived in the cockpit, shaking Shel’s teeth.

One evening, as the sun fell behind the mountains of Corfu, Shel realized he hadn’t thought of Millie in months.

The ship’s captain, A. D. Chandler, was an admirer of his work. He requested Shel take his portrait. In preparation for this intimidating assignment, Shel enlisted Barney Freele as a model, photographing him in the captain’s stateroom. These test shots came out better than expected—it was Shel’s first time using the tripod and flash—and in the berthing he and Freele had a laugh over the prints, the latter’s mock-serious pose, his best impersonation of Captain Chandler’s thousand-yard stare. Shel laid them across his bed to compare shutter and film speeds. A crowd formed.

“You look the part, Barney!”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n Freele!”

“Send one to your mom. She’ll think you’ve been promoted!”

“Think you could take one of me?” another sailor asked him. “For my girl.”

“Sure,” Shel said.

“Two bucks cover it?”

Payment hadn’t occurred to him. “I think we could arrange something,” Shel said.

The sailor’s name was Lurin. He loved the picture and told two friends. Over the next several months, other seamen approached him with the same request, each offering to pay, each calling him, usually for the first time, by his first name. Shel declined their money, just as he had Lurin’s, but after taking their photographs and leaving them on their bunks, he often entered the dark room to find the bills hanging from the line. Victimless, it was the best sort of grift, and he was pleased with its accidental arrangement. And so it came to pass that, upon theDes Moines’s return to Norfolk, he was discharged from active duty with a Nikon camera in his duffel that Captain Chandler had gifted him and over a thousand dollars in cash.

It was lucky he had this money. When he returned to Queens, he discovered that his parents were moving to California. His father was going into business with his brother, Moishe, in San Bernardino; they were opening a fur shop together. His father, Shel learned, was not the poor man he’d always assumed, but from the three jobs he’d worked for as long as Shel could remember he had, along with the sale of their home, squirreled away nearly $70,000. He was dedicating all but $200 to this venture. He gave the money to his son with much fanfare after Shel declined to come west with them and, for all intents and purposes, exited their life.

Greater careers have started with less, Shel figured. This isn’t to say he didn’t feel abandoned by his parents, but there was a difference: he was not afraid.At the beginning of a thing,he thought,a thing seems impossible.

The beginning,Shel reminded himself,is a dark room.

He took a job at Joseph Patelson Music House on Fifty-Sixth, in the shadow of Carnegie Hall, as good a place to start a life as any. During his interview, Mr. Patelson, dapper in his double-breasted suit and white pocket square, asked him his area of specialty. When Shel answered opera, the man walked him to the store’s upright piano and began to play an overture, which Shel instantly identified as Rossini’sErmione.“Impressive,” Mr. Patelson said. “Of course, a new suit,” he said, after offering Shel the job and pinching the lapel of the old one Shel was wearing, “would be evenmoreso.” Along with this purchase, Shel rented a one-bedroom apartment on Seventy-Fifth and Riverside, eighth floor, the highest up he’d ever lived in the city, the window in his tiny living room enjoying an unobstructed view of the Hudson. In fall, the trees dotting Jersey’s cliffs reminded him of theDes Moines’s guns firing; in winter, the rock faces were as gray as the ship’s gunmetal hull. On Saturday mornings, drinking coffee, he spotted the Circle Line on its route around Manhattan. It would be lovely to ride a boat, he thought, but not alone this time. He took the 1 Train downtown in the mornings, but in the evenings, to clear his mind, preferred to walk. And on a brutally cold January night, as he leaned against the wind on the easternmost arc of Columbus Circle, he saw Millie Van Bourne crossing the street.

How to describe seeing someone whose loss you’ve already mourned?He could say it was like encountering a ghost, but that would be inaccurate, for ghosts were not of this world. Millie was standing here before him, her eyes shining in the streetlights. It had been nearly three years, but she appeared thinner, older, sadder, and more beautiful. Her hair was still Marilyn Monroe white. While they spoke, she occasionally glanced over his shoulder, nervously, as if she were supposed to meet someone on this corner. “I’ve thought about you so often,” she said with great sincerity. “I’d wondered what had become of you.” Her smile parted him like a scalpel. He was immediately aware of how much energy he’d expended scouring her from his mind and how powerless he was now to resist her return. She invited him back to her apartment, on Tenth Avenue and Sixtieth Street. As they walked, he mused on how close they’d lived to each other all these months, mere blocks separating them: Shel pausing, for a moment, to gaze on the tiny display windows of Tiffany, while Millie flashed by in the glass’s reflection; she exiting Bloomingdale’s revolving doors—Manhattan’s countless near collisions—as he’d entered; the lonely laps they were unwittingly making together as they walked Central Park’s Great Lawn, the diameter separating them as they strolled in the same direction along its circumference. Who would we see on our periphery, Shel wondered, if we adjusted our vision? Who was walking parallel to us if we widened our depth of field?

Her apartment was large—too large, he realized later—her river view out of six windows a mural to his portrait. He should’ve also noticed how oddly furnished it was, an old-world dowdiness to the decor, the plastic covering the ample, heavy furniture, all of it showroom-like but staged for someone elderly, as if Millie were an actress who’d wandered onto the wrong set. They sat in her living room. Without thinking, they took each other’s hands. She was vague as to how she’d kept busy these past two years: a few commercials, some modeling. A stint as a nightclub hostess most recently. Her sisters had long since fled Manhattan: Maxine was married and living in Chicago, Glenda had returned home to work for their father. Millie described these as very lonely times. As she talked, her affect became distant, to the point of being disengaged, an odd dreaminess Shel could not recall from before, one that seemed an entirely new aspect of her person.

“But now you’re here,” she said, returning from whatever journey had taken her far away.

In the days that followed, it was all Shel could do to get through work, at the end of which he would literally run to meet her out somewhere—at the Rainbow Room or at a show at Radio City Music Hall. But it was their talks afterward, the endlessness of their conversations at the Hotel Edison or Barbetta, over martinis at the King Cole Bar or dinner at Gallagher’s—a lavishness funded by Shel’s shrinking savings. He couldn’t recall now much of what they said, though whatdidstay with him was the ease of it, their familiarity with each other.How rare it is,Shel found himself thinking,to simplylikesomeone.To know, in their company, that you would never be bored.It changed his whole sense of the future: suddenly he was thinking in terms of years, of how they might live in one of Manhattan’s taller buildings or one of the Upper West Side’s brownstones, once he’d made it. He found himself dreaming on their unconceived children’s faces, of two boys blessed with Millie’s finer, smaller features. Until one evening, sitting together in her living room, they heard a key turn in the door.

The encounter unfolded with an accident’s vivid torpor. The older man wore a long brown coat and a fedora. The heavy frames of his glasses hid his appearance while magnifying his eyes so that they glistened like hard-boiled eggs. His hands remained buried in his pockets, a position that might normally convey infirmity, yet as he entered the room, he moved with a limberness that belied his age, to stand before them with the dispassion a detective exhibits before a victim’s body. He did not speak, he uttered no threats and made no claims, although Millie was ashen at the sight of him, robbed of speech before this person who was clearly not a stranger, his expression unchanged as he looked from her to Shel and back while Shel glanced at Millie and then this intruder, and when he rose himself, his heart racing, to saywhathe did not know, the man scrutinized him as calmly as an owl from a branch. Then he turned and, with the selfsame ease and impassivity, left the room and gently closed the apartment door.

The place, Shel later learned, was his, of course, and in a terrifying fashion so was Millie—though how such a thing came to pass Shel couldn’t puzzle out, not even after he’d calmed her down, for herexplanation only revealed that she was a stranger to him, to herself, in ways that Shel surmised were dangerous. She mentioned something about falling in love after Shel had gone overseas—she’d even gotten engaged—only to discover it wasn’t that at all, it was a thing disguised as such but was far more dreadful, perhaps even love’s opposite, for it revealed itself onlyaftershe’d given her heart to this person, after she’d begged her father to lend them money, and there followed a breakup that had not only nearly ruined her emotionally and financially but also left her so dreadfully alone it put her out of her family’s reach, even her sisters. And then this man whose name she would not utter had stepped in to rescue her or affect something that hadappearedlike rescue, but came at a cost so horribly obvious she refused to articulate it.

Her eyes swimming, she said to Shel, “I won’t ask you to help me.”

“Of course I’ll help you,” he said.

She shook her head as if recalling something dreadful. “You could get hurt,” she warned.

Later that night, alone in his apartment, he lay awake gathering his thoughts. There was disappointment, first of all, to have been so quickly supplanted after their breakup. Shel tried to relish this anger, to nurture it—he considered calling to confront Millie—but this desire rapidly dissipated, was mere squall, and he soon turned philosophical. What did it take—just how low did a person have to sink—to strike the kind of bargain she’d made? He sat up in bed, opened his window, smoked a cigarette. He was losing a taste for the habit. Across the Hudson, New Jersey’s lights winked, casting long reflections, as colorful as a color wheel but now resembling to Shel prison bars. Below, car brakes squealed; he heard a crash he could not see, followed by a tinkling of shattered glass. Later, he would reflect that perhaps he did not know Millie at all, that what he loved was merely his own love for her. Now, he concluded that everything that had happened in their time apart might as well be a dream, and just as easily forgotten. There was onlynowandwhat was to come,and this gave him enough peace to sleep, so that when he woke the next morning he decided Millie was exaggerating the danger to him as surely as her own entrapment, and what he needed to do was ask her to marry him and then immediately spirit her away, a decision that canceled out so many other near-term ambitions it left him utterly becalmed.

He dressed for work more certain of what he was doing than at any other time in his life. Just before he left his apartment, he noticed the note shoved under his door.

It Would Be Best if You Do Not See a Certain Person Again or We Will Break Your Yid Face.

He stood in his entryway holding the paper in both hands. His heart made a downy sound, like a pillow being fluffed. He could not help but compare this state with other instances of fear. The over-the-shoulder paranoia aboard theDes Moines,when he thought Logan’s crew would ambush him; the nightmares of being dragged from his berth and thrown overboard that he woke from, kicking the sheets from his bed. When his brother, Marty, would take a seat across from him at the kitchen table and in utter seriousness say, “After Mom and Dad go out tonight, I’m going to drown you in the bathtub.” And there was something that had always terrified Shel about the nights his father had him bring in damaged furs from the Plymouth’s trunk and then whisk them to their basement. The windows his father had covered in sackcloth, lest the union enforcers catch him moonlighting. Shel was certain that he was endangering his father by assisting him, an anxiety later amplified by the sound of the sewing machine below, its enormous whir carrying to the third floor and thus audible on the street, where someone surely lay in wait among the pedestrians and passersby who might rat him out.

With a speed that surprised him, Shel hatched a plan, though in order for it to work he needed to tell Millie first.

When the elevator opened on her floor, the old man was standing directly before him, wearing the same fedora and long coat. His hands were again in the coat’s pockets. Shel wasn’t sure what to do, feeling something between terror and embarrassment, for a confrontation seemed inevitable. The elevator door began to close, its slide an action both men watched intently, since this was the moment, after all, where the line drawn by the night before, by the note, would be crossed. Shel palmed the plunger, but not without trepidation, so that the door reversed course, and then he held it there, retracted. The man’s magnified eyes blinked mechanically, and the brim of his hat dipped as hebegan to walk toward Shel, who in turn exited the car, holding himself close as if trying to avoid a much larger person; and when they stood on opposite sides of each other once more, Shel felt rebuffed by the man’s straight-ahead indifference and imperturbable disengagement. Once again there was the chilling sense that the wrinkled face behind the thick lenses was loose, slack rubber that disguised another face beneath. Shel walked backward, wanting the moment to end. But the elevator buzzed, the door had stayed held open too long and was stuck, and well down the hallway by now, Shel watched the dumb slowness with which the elevator door finally slid closed and the alarm ceased. Through the porthole’s glass, at first only the top of the man’s lowered brim was visible, but just before the car sank the old man raised his chin, shaking his head ever so slightly at Shel, a gesture he could not be sure was warning or weariness. And then the car sank, and the window’s eye lidded black.