— Must not use the crosstown bus very often, the driver said, — because it’s been some years this bus here been going down Madison. Other bus goes down Washington, so now people on this side of town, they don’t have to walk so far, like the people on the other side, they mostly don’t have to walk so far.
— Maybe it’s not your house, the guy from the station wagon remarked.
— What did you say? said M. J.
— I mean maybe you’re trying to get me to bust you into a house doesn’t belong to you.
— Want to see my driver’s license?
— Could be this isn’t even your street. Maybe somebody else lives here. Drivers license? Hey, you can buy one of those.
— That’s really rude. What you’re saying is just rude.
The face of the tanned guy(she supposed now that he was called Norbert), indicated a substantial cruelty heretofore concealed. She could tell that he would not be a resource in her hour of need. Meanwhile, the cars on the street in a furious klaxoning. The ambulance, the crosstown bus parked side by side. Police beside paramedics. A fireman wandered through asking if his services were needed. At the corner, a traffic cop who had appeared to wave rush-hour flow onto Seventh Street had recognized a friend among the assembled. He stepped out of the intersection to chat with this rotundity of sweatsuit. Traffic languished. Next, there was a street vendor, one of Hoboken’s sellers of ices, with a cart and a dozen bottles, chipping away with his pick, loading on raspberry syrup; around him three or four friends heaving crimson dice, talking fast in a froth of Spanish and English: results of first games of the football season, difficulties of wives, how a couple of Anglos in the wrong neighborhood gonna jack up the rents, this town where they had gotten halfway through demolishing the ferry terminal so that they could put up top-dollar developments like amusement arcades, shopping centers, luxury condos, you could neither take a ferry from the terminal nor use the location for anything else; it was the Committee for a Better Waterfront versus the people who had lived there since they were kids, played stickball on the blacktop over by Observer Highway; the people who lived there were mainly for devel opment, even if it brought nothing to them but wrecking balls and Food Courts; and this very theme had now erupted on Madison Street, before the flickering holiday lights of the Mad Son Electric Gallery of Hoboken, whereupon a BMW-owner, wearing Ray-Bans and a yellow power tie, climbed out of his convertible, and took it up with the men by the street vendor, and yet they all agreed, everyone agreed, You think it’s a bad idea to have a beautifully designed series of buildings down there, and some shops, with the Empire State Building, right cross the water? The men, in their basketball jerseys and worn baseball caps, jeans and construction boots, wordless, That’s a good idea, the young urban professional continued, which will improve real estate values in the neighborhood. Its better for the tax base. There will be jobs. Strapped himself back into his car, satisfied with urban planning, and there he sat, immobilized in traffic.
— Over my dead body a bunch of trees down there on that water! Over my dead body! We don’t need no more parks! We got plenty of damn parks already! That’s just going to cause filth from pigeons and rats! We need tax monies! observed Mrs. Vincenzo.
Autumn, county fair of tonalities. People filed out of workplaces, out of tenements, onto stoops. Last time they could do so for months. Leaves clogged the street, the sewer lines. Where had these leaves come from? They were three blocks from the nearest tree. Northeast storms had blown through earlier, as storms did this time of year, and the limbs of the trees, those that remained in the Mile-Square City, were picked clean; each new gust brought a dusting of yellow symbols of decay. Clearly, it wasn’t only M. J. who made a poetics, a worldview, out of a drop in the temperature and a diminishment of light. Itremble like an aspen leaf, Nijinsky said. Her parents’ house had beautiful autumns. When the weather was fine, she practiced out on the lawn, while the man next door clipped graying blooms from his once bright hydrangeas. She bobbed above the clean lines of a box hedge, perfecting leaps, faint with hunger. She was always hungry. She was always cold.
The tawny huckster with the scheme to break and enter, Norbert, accepted her offer of a Major Video, Inc. lifetime membership card and began working on the lock, which seemed to involve scoring the paint job on the door frame with the edge of the plastic lamination. Gerry Abramowitz had his own Major Video card. This one could be sacrificed. From desperate sprees of video rental Gerry returned, in his usual nervous way, uncertain, taciturn, with a home festival of science fiction films and teen sex comedies. Talk to me a little bit, she asked. He’d laughed. He stayed up watching films after she’d gone to sleep and left early with his stack of bibliographical index cards. Her locksmith pro tern tried buzzing the tenants on the first floor. He bent the video membership card until it had a veiny fracture in it. M. J. was almost certain, in the light of streetlamps, that guests for the party had now begun to assemble. There was a couple in bowling shoes and Hawaiian shirts, his and hers, hair slicked with the grease of the period, Tenax or Vaseline; there was a guy with heavy tortoiseshell frames and a secondhand madras jacket. All bantering. M. J. would not meet these, her guests, on the front step, locked out, having given away Diet Coke and orange soda. It was humiliating.
— The Carnival Tradition, from Bakhtin, said the madras jacket.
— I thought it was Bakunin, said the woman.
— That’s anarchism.
— I know what anarchism is. You’ve got your B’s confused.
— We could go to the Middle Eastern place, you know.
— Uh, no civilization endures without temporary suspension of the rules of civilization.
— Let’s wait a few more minutes.
— Got a cigarette?
Whereupon the door to the building next to M. J.’s opened, being 619 Madison, known drug location, according to law enforcement circles, known for its potent smok-able form of cocaine. They had never given her any trouble over there, in the known drug location. They were vital and spirited American entrepreneurs. The door, a flimsy old composite affair, into which had been installed cheap stained glass, from Sears, swung back, and out of it came the dream within this dream, a cherub, a teenaged boy from next door, a Hispanic young man, an Edgardo or Jose or Miguel, perhaps, a fraternizer with users of the potent smokable form of cocaine, but with a perfect Hispanic celestial quality that he, young Angel, would have until he was older, had put on a few pounds, become a working stiff, traded beauty for dignity; for now as perfect as a boy in Hoboken could possibly be in pressed jeans, black work shoes, James Dean windbreaker, expertly tousled black hair, having strode out of a jailbreak movie, carrying somebody’s turntable, she couldn’t help thinking that he was stealing the turntable, and when he saw the crowd outside the front door, he turned, as if to rethink the plan, to secret himself indoors, away from the authorities. Did anyone still buy LPs? Even that store down by the PATH terminal where the gruff stoner with sideburns and ponytail wordlessly dispensed obscure rock and roll on vinyl — Syd Barrett, Lothar and the Hand People, the Nazz — even that store was on its way out; so why would Angel, the Hispanic cherub, steal a turntable?