“You could look it up,” Sanno said, getting out of the booth, nodding at Junior at the bar, going for his hat and coat, thinking: Yeah, it’s their turn. He looked out at the cold winter rain and saw palm trees and white sand and could hear the long slow roar of the sea.
NYDIA GLANCED AT THE ceiling. “There,” she said. “Did you hear it?”
Ira blinked, his hands flat on the round oak table. She was cleaning away the dishes.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t hear anything, honey.” He forced a smile. “You sure you’re not getting paranoid?”
“I know what I
“Well, I didn’t hear a thing,” he said, abruptly rising and taking some of the other dishes to the sink. The room filled with the aroma of brewing coffee. He looked out the window at the darkness of the Brooklyn night.
“I heard it last night,” she said, rinsing dishes and placing them in the dishwasher. “When you were over at Fred’s…I heard it last week, too. Footsteps. Someone walking. And now again, just now. There’s someone up there, Ira.”
He whirled, a savage curl in his voice. “Well, what do you want me to
Her face crumpled. She turned off the faucet and hurried into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. He held the edge of the sink and breathed out heavily. Brooklyn. What a mistake.… He glanced around the loft, her stacked paintings, the new one on the easel, the cluttered table where she kept her paints. His own desk was piled with textbooks, yellow pads, red pens, the armory of a schoolteacher. It looked almost peaceful. And this loft, this space, was what they had wanted, what they had searched for through those grinding, humiliating months, wanting to live together in some civilized way. They had looked everywhere and at everything, at cramped one-bedroom places in SoHo, they’d trampled roaches on the West Side, badgered doormen on the East Side, and then had given up on Manhattan and crossed the river. They’d given up quickly on Brooklyn Heights, too, and Park Slope, and then they found the Factory.
“It was closed for a few years,” the real estate man said, “and then someone bought it and decided to make it into co-ops. That didn’t work out too well. So it’s a rental now.…”
The block-square building was a rambling nineteenth-century redbrick pile. It had one of those names invented by real estate developers, of course, but Ira soon discovered that the old-timers in the neighborhood still called it the Factory. And they talked about it in a sour, bitter way. Once, it had been a reason for the existence of the neighborhood, almost seven hundred jobs filling its floors, the workers living in the now-ruined streets around it, eating, drinking, growing old in the stores and bars along the avenue.
Then had come the big strike, the men picketing through a brutal winter, management treating them with iron indifference, and finally there was a fire. Dozens of strikers rushed into the fire before the engines arrived, trying to save the machines that had given them jobs and life for generations. Some of them died. And then the Factory itself died, the owners packing up the remains and leaving for Taiwan or Alabama, and when the Factory died, so did the neighborhood.
“You know what it meant when you people started moving in?” one old man said to Ira. “It meant jobs would never come back. Never. They were gone forever.…”
Still, the price was right, and there was space for Ira’s books and Nydia’s paints, and the subway was only three blocks away. Brooklyn. It would be all right. It was the best they could do. What a mistake, Ira thought, moving across the loft to the bedroom door with a cup of fresh coffee as a signal of truce. He knocked.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
He heard no answer and opened the door. She was lying facedown on the large brass bed. The picture of her father outside their old house in San Antonio was tipped over. “Here’s your coffee, honey.…”
She turned to him.
“Thanks, Ira. Thanks. But I’m just too tired. I took a pill, and…”
“Okay, I have some papers to grade.”
She just didn’t know how to live in cities, he thought, never mind the Factory. That was the problem. There were sirens at night, bottles breaking, shards of arguments, a hundred radios blending into jumble and din. In the summer, he bought an air conditioner, and sealed the windows, but that didn’t work. The sounds of the Brooklyn streets still came at her like an assault.
“I’ll never live in a quiet place again,” she said to him one Sunday morning. “I just know it….”
