Wait a minute, he thought. It was
Wait a minute, it began with a nine, I think.
Just hold it a minute.
Well, look, the numbers here all begin with a thirteen, so it couldn’t have been a goddamn nine, did you ever look up at the numbers when you went into the building?
Well, wait, it was near a liquor store, wasn’t it? Wasn’t there a liquor store a few blocks away? Jesus, how many liquor stores are there on Third Avenue, or was it a liquor store at all? Yes, of course it was, but wasn’t there a bakery downstairs? Or a stationery store? Wait, it could have been a petshop or a saloon, it could have been a pizzeria, it could have been
Look, Grace don’t do
The numbers here all begin with a thirteen — was it thirteen nine something? No, it
Just hold on a minute, will you, because the address is on the tip of my tongue, who are you kidding, you never knew the address! Grace, the world is on the tip of my tongue, we can beat this whole damn system, I’ll remember in a minute, please don’t do anything stupid. He was suddenly overcome with a wave of panic so great that he leaned against the side of the building and closed his eyes and stood there limply with his heart pounding and his knees trembling, and it was then that his head began to throb and he knew that he was in for another migraine.
At first, he did not want to open his eyes. He did not want to open them and find that his vision had blurred again, not now when he was so close to making a new start, not now when he knew that everything would work out all right if only he could get back to Grace. But instead, he opened his eyes at once. There was no time to waste. The thing to do was to find her building immediately before his vision began to blur. It had to be somewhere along here, didn’t it? He was in the damn apartment not three hours ago, it couldn’t have simply vanished!
He walked rapidly up the avenue, his head throbbing, waiting for his vision to blur at any moment. He knew he was on the right side of the avenue, but he saw nothing that looked even vaguely familiar to him. He was certain he had come too far uptown, and then certain he had not come far enough uptown, and then certain he was walking in the wrong direction. He began wondering if she lived on Third Avenue at all, and not possibly Lexington or Madison. Then, as he walked, he felt a slowly dawning hope when he realized that all he had to do was look her up in the phone book — Grace MacCauley, that was her name; all he had to do was look her up and find her address that way. He almost walked into an open candy store and then he remembered that she was Jewish. How could a Jewish girl be named Grace MacCauley? How could Harry Truman be Jewish? Hadn’t they said he was Jewish? How could Floyd Patterson be colored and white at the same time? Why wasn’t Beethoven a deaf composer instead of a kid who wanted to go to Pratt Institute and who died on Tarawa? How can he be a face on the roof of Il Duomo? How can God be a crazy old man who followed me from N.Y.U.? Isn’t anyone what he seems to be? Doesn’t anyone have an identity? How can I know who I am if I don’t know who anyone else is?
Grace, for crying out loud, this is a hell of a time to cop out on me. Where are you? Listen, I’ll start yelling in a minute, Grace, I swear to God! I’ll yell Grace MacCauley at the top of my lungs and wake up the whole damn neighborhood. She’s not Grace MacCauley, he thought, she hasn’t been Grace MacCauley for a long long time. You stupid jackass, she isn’t Grace at all, don’t you know that? Not Grace MacCauley and not Grace anything. She is a Jewish social worker you picked up on Broadway. She sent you down for booze because some of her friends are coming over. What time is it now? Are they still there? Come on, Grace, cut this out! Now, where’s that damn apartment of yours?
In desperation, he began looking up at the lighted windows in the faces of the buildings. He saw a thousand window slits peering back at him intently, he saw a girl in one of the windows turning down a bed, he saw a man in another stroking a dog’s head — Dan, he thought. Dan MacCauley, of course. Why, that’s his name, of course. He’s her brother, isn’t he, so his name must be Dan MacCauley, so all I have to do is call him up and ask him where Grace
No. No, we don’t want to do that, do we? No, he wouldn’t cooperate. He wouldn’t give me the address even if he knew it. No, I don’t want to call him. Besides, he isn’t what he seems to be, either. Nobody is. He’s not a man, he’s not someone who’ll help you when you need it, he’s a dogman trained to leap at your throat, he’s no different from any of the tigers, how’d a louse like him ever get a sweet kid like Grace for a sister? Hey, Grace, yoo-hoo, where are you? Yoo-hoo, Arthur, here I am, he thought, and suddenly he looked up at the windows lining Third Avenue and felt the same painful isolation he had known on the dock watching the disembarking passengers. It seemed to him that life pulsed in each of those warm amber rectangles, the woman who sat up there leaning on her windowsill with curlers in her hair, the man sitting by the window reading his newspaper, the girl taking off her blouse and then belatedly coming to the shade to pull it down. No! he thought, don’t pull down the shade, don’t cut me off! I want to come back! I want to be among the living!
His vision blurred then.
What had earlier been a thousand amber slits now became two thousand, all denying him entrance, all refusing to recognize him. He ran down the avenue searching each window, shaking his head. It seemed to him that shade after shade went down, life after life was suddenly snuffed out until the avenue was a wall of glowing blind rectangles. He darted into the doorway near the bakery only because it seemed to be a haven from this suddenly hostile wall of glowing blinded eyes. There were garbage cans stacked for the night on the ground floor behind the staircase. He sat on one of them, breathing harshly, not knowing where he would go next, his head pounding. The hallway, the staircase, the feeble naked light bulb all blurred out of focus in the excruciating pain of his headache. He reached into his watch pocket and took out the remaining gelatin capsule, and then put it on his tongue, and tried to force it down without any water. He choked on the capsule, and spat it out, and then sat helplessly on the garbage can while he continued to cough, certain he would retch. The coughing spell passed. The pain in his head, aggravated by the coughing, was unbearable. He tried to focus on the ejected gelatin capsule, which lay on the floor not three feet from the garbage can, but he saw only a blurred amoebalike smear on the asphalt tile of the vestibule. He closed his eyes. The yellow light flickered in the darkness of his skull.
He did not know how long he sat on the garbage can with his eyes closed. When he opened them again, his vision was still blurred, but the panic was gone and he was able to appraise the hallway calmly between the rising and falling waves of pain that attacked his temple. The hallway seemed familiar. The mailboxes outside, the naked hanging light bulb — wasn’t this the hallway he had
He rose slowly to his feet. Through his blurred vision, he tried to overlay this hallway onto the hallway he remembered, the one Grace had led him into earlier tonight. Wasn’t that the same wallpaper? Hadn’t there been a stain just there? And that tear in the carpet on the stair tread, wasn’t that there before? Cautiously, he put his hand on the banister and began climbing. He could not remember which floor she lived on, but he knew it was high up in the building, certainly the third floor, or perhaps even higher. He could hear the sounds of life again. They came from behind closed doors, muffled, but definitely the sounds of life. He stopped in the third-floor corridor and looked at the closed doorways all around him. There were four apartments on the floor. He could hear a television set going in one of them. In another, there was the sound of someone coughing. He knocked on the nearest door.