Glen and Joe
by Emil Draitser

As he slammed his apartment door shut behind him, Glen felt a light, by now familiar, uneasiness. For the past two weeks, he'd walk down the long half-lit corridor in the dark mirrored area by the elevators and discover a morose gentleman there. The stranger was much older than Glen, rather homely and unsmiling. He scowled at the world with his deep-set eyes. He made a sloppy appearance: he wore his threadbare jeans askew; his red, unwashed jacket was too short (his arms stuck out from his sleeves resembling lobster pincers); his hair was disheveled.

Today, before stepping into the elevator car, Glen cast another glance at the Stranger. He reminded Glen of someone. Could it be himself? Impossible! Glen rejected this foolish idea outright. After all, he knew well what he looked like. There were at least three mirrors in his apartment. One was from the waist up in the bathroom. Whistling Glen, cheeks lathered, squinted into it while shaving, now with the left eye, now with the right. Another one was also half-size inside the bedroom closet. The lack of light always annoyed him when he’d put on his shirt. The third one, full-length, was in the living room to the right of the main apartment door, where he gave himself a final look-over on his way out. Here he found himself in one of several guises: Glen — concentrated on his upcoming business meeting, Glen — jittery before a date, or Glen—frowning in anticipation of a trip to the supermarket (where he knew he'd forget something).

Glen little resembled this guy in the mirror near the elevator. Glen was taller than average and broad-shouldered, whereas the Stranger was stocky. Glen’s jacket was of a similar style to the one that the man in the mirror wore, but Glen’s one looked fancy and fitting, whereas the one the man wore was dull and fit poorly. The man's gloomy expression (Glen named him Sullen Joe), a blend of boredom and misanthropy, hardly fit Glen's temperament. That's for sure! Glen was a poet —and not the usual kind, but a cheerful one; he wrote for children. He was successful in his chosen work. A large firm published him. He appeared on television and in kindergartens, where the little ones would swarm over him, like bees on a beekeeper. They clung to his arms and chirped with pleasure when he invited them to sit astride his feet as he walked. In the lines of his brisk verse were grace, boldness, and the unrestrained joy of living.

As Glen recited his poems to himself, waiting for the elevator, in contrast, the man he saw framed in the mirror looked tired of life, as if he existed just to put on more weight and grow older. This Stranger had the rigid, clay-baked lips of a peasant. He barely moved them, like that same peasant counting his earnings from the sale of hay to the dealer he suspects is swindling him.

At first, this evoked in Glen only a curiosity, a nervous cock of the eyes in Sullen Joe's direction, a twitch of the jacket here, the shirt sleeves there. There were even moments of comedy, especially on those days when he was heading for an important meeting. As Glen reached the elevator bank, Joe would bring his face closer and look at him with wary penetration, as though expecting some kind of trick. At this moment, Joe would reveal a sense of humor you'd hardly suspect in that kind of glum character. He mimicked Glen's nervous mannerisms well. The anxious inspection of the chin where there was always a danger of missing stubble in the dimple. The plucking of stray hairs from his jacket lapel. The tugging at his tie from side to side in search of the centerline, his pinkie extended —a gesture, which, in others, always irritated Glen. A master at doing his tie, Glen caught his pitiful imitator's blunder —the devil knew what he was doing with his tie. Glen had to show the secret of executing an elegant knot.

Most often, Glen tried to ignore the alien in the mirror; only in passing did he recognize his presence. Joe was like a pinkish speck you notice with some dismay under your nose and soothe yourself, thinking in a few days, it disappears without a trace.

As time passed by, Glen observed the Stranger with increasing curiosity, mixed with his bewilderment, with a dash of fear. Sometimes humility, fatigue, and estrangement imprinted on Joe's face, feelings foreign to Glen. He was in fine physical shape for a man of forty-eight. Every other day he jogged in a nearby park; on Saturdays, he played tennis with his friend Tony, a retired lawyer, lanky and bushy-headed for his age. Often, after a run and hot-and-cold shower, Glen felt youthful and full of life. He numbered himself among life's late bloomers, and observed the motto "Full Speed Ahead!", though he recognized that from time to time—not too often, however—this steamship captain's command had gotten him into trouble.

Late one night, Glen returned from a little party, which Lenny Kaufman, his publisher, threw in honor of his new book. Glen had enjoyed more shots than usual of his favorite whiskey, Jack Daniels. Strong rain and wind had blown, snapping the power lines. On his floor it was dark: at the far end of the corridor, a sole shaded ceiling bulb blinked. As he headed for his apartment, Glen could swear, even before turning to look, that Joe was right there behind him, staring from the darkness by the elevators, his arms crossed on his chest and eyes gleaming.

"A middle-aged Alice in Wonderland, my foot!" Glen spat under his breath.

He decided to find out for sure who this Stranger was. What was his business on his floor, and why was he giving Glen those mysterious looks, now wary, now mocking?

He took action. The opportunity came unexpectedly. One day, Glen was on his way out to see the redheaded Irving, his agent. They needed to discuss a new contract. Splashed with the fashionable cologne "Misha," decked out in a loosely fitting pinstriped gray suit from Bergdorf Goodman, Glen had pressed the button calling the elevator when the Stranger's skeptical brief smile flashed in the mirror.

The elevator doors had already rolled open before him when Glen did an about-face and headed toward where he suspected this unbearable Joe lived. On both walls of the long corridor, ten feet apart from each other, narrow dark mirrors were staggered. As he moved, Glen caught by his side-glance that the face of the somber man whom he sometimes examined waiting for the elevator flashed now on his left side, then on his right. The small bronze key in the stranger's hand was a spitting image of the one in Glen's hand.

The lock clicked. Glen fling opened the door. What a contrast to his place! He maintained an orderly In Glen's place, piled in one corner of his enormous desk were drafts of poems sketched for future use, their ultimate destination yet undetermined. In the other corner was typed work, ready to be sent out. Shelved to the right were books he was reading for inspiration. The clean paper was stacked not only on his writing desk, but on the edge of the dinner table, and the nightstand by the head of his bed—everywhere and anywhere within reach.

The Stranger's apartment terrified him. Glen shuttered at the sight of manuscripts scattered every which way. Some lay flat on the couch and empty cardboard computer boxes ... Randomly opened books... Pencil stubs... Scores of ball-point pens. The entire mess was strewn with tobacco ash. More a bear’s lair than a human’s lodging, all of it—the cold cigarette smoke, settled-in dust, overheated coffee, long-unwashed bed sheets—reeked of a premature decrepitude, neglect, loneliness, the abandonment of all those life illusions that give it its meaning and purpose. Why would anyone want to live in such a pigsty?

Glen approached the desk and pushed a button on the answering machine. He was curious to know who would ever call that awful Joe. Glen turned on the outgoing message. In contrast to his own steady, pleasant baritone, the sound that came from the look-alike of his own beige Panasonic model was a high, almost boyish, falsetto. Imagine that, a grown man peeping like an infant! Glen recalled in the eyes of the somewhat flabby Joe, in discordance with his character, a certain adolescent confusion and childlike swelling of the eyelids. Well, well, well. Was Sullen Joe just an overgrown teenager?

Glen poked around the desk and, in the left bottom drawer, stumbled upon a tattered, piebald embossed album with several dozen faded black and white photos. From one of them, a young man with a puffed-up head of hair, like the Nubian king’s crown, stared. Though he tried to appear arrogant, what came across was an awareness of his homeliness. He had himself photographed his head raised because his broad nose made a more passable impression from that angle. In other pictures, he took the same, rather ridiculous, pose, his head tilted up in this affected haughtiness.

In still another picture the same youth, his arrogant expression now depressed by some failure, wore a dark blue raincoat of thin plastic and squinted against a shore wind (behind him, there was the edge of a crowded sea beach). He clenched in his right hand a cheap Toshiba transistor, popular at the time. Could it be that in his bleak early years the malicious Stranger from the corridor mirror had lugged a boom box around the city, like a billion other street kids? Unbelievable!

There was also a group shot: the same fellow with a bunch of louts. They resembled some Asian cattle herdsmen. Maybe they were just ordinary lowlifes, fans of drinking to stupefaction... They hardly reminded you of revolutionaries, secret admirers of Zarathustra’s interpreter, or, even less so, of London's five o'clock social set.

The photos did not solve the mystery. All of us are skilled actors. In that instant when the camera turns its lens on us, the fat man can always pull in his belly; the scoundrel gives his eyes the kindest expression; the misanthrope feint love for humanity. Chalk it up to the immobility of the camera's gaze, the deception of frozen movement. You had to catch the dynamics.

Glen bought a miniature pear-shaped video camera at the Spy Store, where one day he'd dropped in out of curiosity. He fastened it to the wall near the elevator, and at Joe the Stranger's first appearance, he groped in his pocket for the remote control button.

The catch was meager: only when examining the tape in slow motion, frame by frame, Glen detected his subject's sloping back, his habit of drawing his head into the shoulders, his fleeting sly sneer. He found Joe’s manner of walking unpleasant. He walked with his feet at right angles to one another, the way an old acquaintance of Glen's, a building manager, did. People with this penguin-like gait disgusted Glen. It confirmed once more that the effort of the character in the dark mirror to impersonate him was a miserable failure.

Months passed. Living his life as usual—composing poetry, interacting with the editors and illustrators of his books, traveling to readers' clubs, going to restaurants and the theater with friends on Saturdays—Glen ran into the Stranger. The encounters never lasted long. Lost in thought, Glen lifted his head to meet Joe's dreary gaze—now in a restaurant restroom, now in a hotel lobby.

Once, appearing at a kindergarten in an ancient mansion, from the corner of his eye, Glen noticed sullen Joe leaning against a pillar. He glowered at Glen from over a bunch of papers clenched in one hand, the other holding his chin like a Rodin figure. Glen was reading some new poetry. From time to time, a burst of enthusiastic laughter interrupted him, both from the kids and their nannies and moms dressed up for the occasion. As he eyed Joe, it struck Glen that he disliked children; he could barely restrain his annoyance at them. It was obvious: their monstrous egoism disgusted him, their whining extortions, their cold-bloodedly planned and well-staged hysterics, seasoned with screams and tears—displays that from an adult would be unseemly. Sullen Joe, unlike Glen, saw children not as touching and innocent versions of their parents, but as cruel little beasts devoid of compassion. As if to prove his point, in the middle of the reading one six-year-old gentleman with dark blue overalls and a fierce cowboy expression grabbed the hair of a little fat boy in clownishly wide red pants and pulled his wailing playmate around the room with all his might.

The sudden emergence of this unpleasant strain of intolerance in Joe so struck Glen that what had been just an irritation at the former's frequent appearances now turned into sharp malevolence. What a monster! The more closely Glen examined him, the more he learned about him, and the more he hated Joe. For example, whenever Glen was late for an important appointment (which often happened), he only gnashed his teeth at the cars that slowed to a crawl ahead of him. But Joe, whose strained face would flash in the rearview mirror, let himself curse like a sailor. The dissonance of his hoarse yells cut Glen to the bone. Those lowbred obscenities were sickening to Glen's poetic nature.

In his attitude toward Joe, there was an element of masculine envy. From his adolescent years, Glen had suffered from shyness. He considered himself something of a lightweight in romantic matters. Joe's biography turned out to have quite a few victories on the amorous front. Examining the tapes from the camera in the corridor day after day, Glen discovered the Stranger in the company of young and beautiful women looking at him with a mixture of awe and adoration. Glen was ready to admit that, given a chance, he'd have followed Joe's example. But Joe seemed never to be waiting for such a chance; he made his opportunities. Despite his slovenliness and surly demeanor, Joe zeroed in on the most stunning beauty and lured her into bed. How could he be so disarming? Was it that blend of insolence and pity that his appearance aroused in a woman? Meeting a belle, Glen beat around the bush and hoped to detect the slightest hint of encouragement. Joe, no later than the second date, got straight to the point: "I want you!" — and ended up getting her.

To Glen, this was offensive. He was considerate, without exception, to all the women he met. But sullen Joe treated them cavalierly. One day, screening the tape of his spy camera, Glen discovered Joe had shoved a tall brown-haired woman in a dark fur coat out of the apartment in the middle of the night. (The time indicator recorded that the shameful act took place at 3:07 a.m.). The sobbing lady, who looked like a model, had been heading for the elevator, and from the door ajar, the owner's falsetto had shouted filth after her. When he woke up in the morning, Glen sensed a sharp pang of shame. The guilt of this poor damsel had been mere that, finding herself in Joe's company late in the evening, she'd resisted his advances. She wanted the courtship to continue longer. She was afraid to seem readily available—an understandable feeling of a woman with a keen sense of dignity.

Joe was somewhere nearby, close, and Glen sensed his presence—unpleasant at that—with his very skin. Now he caught not only Joe's intonations in his voice but his most cherished thoughts and emotions. With each passing day, Glen became more and more convinced that Joe had a full load of all those traits that disgusted him and he'd never tolerate in himself. Joe played the hypocrite left and right, or else lied in a way that Glen would have considered beneath him. Glen found one of his actions particularly disgusting: kowtowing to the powerful—influential literary critics, well-known publishers, and the producers of the most popular children's television shows, where an appearance often doubled book sales. Glen had always thought of racism as a manifestation of intellectual poverty and a serious emotional defect. To his utter revulsion, in moments of rage, Joe would deride blacks, Jews, and Puerto Ricans.

Weeks and months were passing. Glen still couldn't get used to the constant presence of Sullen Joe in his life. The continual sightings in the mirror by the elevator door became even more annoying, barely tolerable. There was only one exception. One day, a few bars of salsa escaped from the adjacent apartment; Glen's neighbor made no secret of his love of Latin music. To Glen's amazement, the character in the mirror moved his hips to the driving rhythm—so adroitly he could have been an ancient Egyptian woman performing a ritual belly dance! For an instant, it captivated Glen. True, Joe caught himself almost at once and turned red from embarrassment at his own shimmying, his face returning to the usual dreary expression.

This was the only break in Sullen Joe's monotonous and predictable behavior. What a pain in the neck this guy is! —Glen often said to himself. He dreamed of the time when the now-too-familiar Stranger would disappear from his life. It got to where Glen would take the stairs, instead of his floor elevator, just to avoid the unpleasant encounters.

Suddenly, as if in answer to his prayers, the Stranger was gone. Or maybe Glen forgot to scan the elevator area. He had no more time for checking around: he'd fallen in love with a long-legged and long-haired actress from the Theater of Shadows passing through town. Her body in its snug leotard, projected by a back-light onto the screen, was supple enough to assume the form of medieval castles and fairy tale characters—from the Terrible Beast capturing the Kind Beauty to the Noble Lion taught by the Wise Gray Mouse. Glen spent all of his free—and not so free—time at the theater. The actress was always either performing or rehearsing for a new show.

Glen rushed to the tall, thick-nosed theater owner. He begged him to take him into the troupe, even if just to play pieces of scenery. The owner inspected him from head to toe and answered that he didn't want to offend, but he doubted Glen was limber enough to portray a roadside boulder….

"I'll catch up," Glen said. "I'll join a gym like I've been meaning to do for a long time."

The theater man gave a slight grin.

Glen's entire world became black and white. He shuttled back and forth between the darkness of the wings—the backstage was tightly draped since the thinnest sliver of light could destroy the effect and threaten the performance—and the eye-stinging brightness of day. Often Glen left the theater late at night when his sweetheart's body was spent with fatigue. Love and art—what else demands from us all we have! Glen often dozed on the move. Goggle-eyed, he'd just make it home—miraculously without falling asleep behind the wheel—and then drop straight into bed. A few hours later, he'd come to and tear back to the Theater of Shadows. In those quarter-hours needed to fly through the city, he squinted from the brilliance of the sun reflected in the blue rain puddles. He discovered that the elderly woman selling Italian ices on the corner nearest his building—he'd seen her there more than once—must have been a real beauty once. The smell of gasoline from the filling station reminded him of the first lilacs in the town of his youth. This would all someday spill out into his poems.

For now, however, love-besotted Glen could barely sit still for even half an hour with a piece of paper. All he could manage each day was an isolated line jotted down on the back of an envelope. To his horror, he recognized that in one part of his mind, he was storing up all that was happening to him for future poems. But he forgave himself for this. Writing is an amoral profession, with its own laws—he'd perceived that long ago.

In those rare moments when Glen bothered to raise his head approaching the elevator, all he noticed were his gray herringbone coat hovering in the air a foot above the ground, and a pale, sleep-deprived version of his own face—on which, somehow, an empty smile coexisted with terror before the sharp attack of happiness. Yet, they already set the term of the latter: the Theater of Shadows was leaving in two weeks. When he tried to convince the actress to stay, her black eyebrows arched. She listened to him while maintaining her handstand position, her long hair thrown onto her legs, her knees tucked into her chest—that evening she was a Chinese waterfall during the Ming dynasty—and whispered to him in answer, as he stood in the wings: "Oh my dear and unforgettable one! I'd want that for myself. But what about my shadow? Without me, she'd die of grief!"

After a week's extension, the theater left. It took Glen a good four months to get over his three-week black and white fever. He was wondering with whom he had his romance—the actress or her shadow. But life, at last, unhooked its brakes with a screech, and once again, rolled along as before. Irving got a new contract for him; in the television company where he had connections, they started the "Only for Children" show, and they invited Glen to contribute. The writing flowed as easily as ever. He gathered the envelopes with the feverish notes taken during the Theater of Shadows era and wrote a cycle of poems for adults. Irving praised them and said he would try to place them in a literary journal, though they shouldn't expect any money for them. But he'd do it for the sake of their old friendship.

Glen almost forgot about Sullen Joe, except for one occasion, right at the beginning of his black and white affair. Finding himself alone with his actress for the first time, he'd decided on a direct attack, and had heard Joe's high-pitched voice with its ample portion of nerve:

"What about a kiss?"

"You're badly brought up," the actress had said, offering her lips. "What kind of man would talk like that to a woman he hardly knows?"

Now, heading for the elevators, Glen sensed a kind of emptiness in not seeing his Stranger in the usual place. To his surprise, this feeling resembled what he sometimes experienced when his work received critical acclaim—he could always tell commercial flattery from authentic praise.

About two weeks later, Glen saw Joe's face by the elevator bank. They smiled at each other like old friends.

One thing baffled him. For a split second, one foot in the car, Glen glimpsed a character behind Joe's back in a shabby gray sweater, with a slight smirk on his face. So who was this? Glen pressed the button to the garage level and, after the doors rolled shut with a pleasant murmur, he felt strange contentment. He already knew he would see this new one, this yet-unnamed third man, in many days to come….


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