The Assistant

by Bernard Malamud

The early November street was dark though night had ended, but the wind, to the grocer’s surprise, already clawed.

The total now came to $2.03, which he never hoped to see. But Ida would nag if she noticed a new figure, so he reduced the amount to $1.61. His peace—the little he lived with—was worth forty-two cents.

The grocer sighed and waited. Waiting he thought he did poorly. When times were bad time was bad. It died as he waited, stinking in his nose.

Virginity she thought she had parted with without sorrow, yet was surprised by torments of conscience, or was it disappointment at being valued under her expectations?

Nat Pearl, handsome, cleft-chinned, gifted, ambitious, had wanted without too much trouble a lay and she, half in love, had obliged and regretted. Not the loving, but that it had taken her so long to realize how little he wanted. Not her, Helen Bober.

She had wanted, admittedly, satisfaction, but more than that—respect for the giver of what she had to give, had hoped desire would become more than just that.

On the platform, as the train moved away, she caught a glimpse of Nat standing before her empty seat, calmly reading. She walked on, lacking, wanting, not wanting, not happy.

The grocer, on the other hand, had never altered his fortune, unless degrees of poverty meant alteration, for luck and he were, if not natural enemies, not good friends.

He labored long hours, was the soul of honesty—he could not escape his honesty, it was bedrock; to cheat would cause an explosion in him, yet he trusted cheaters—coveted nobody’s nothing and always got poorer.

Helen removed her hat as she entered the grocery. “Me,” she called, as she had from childhood. It meant that whoever was sitting in the back should sit and not suddenly think he was going to get rich.

He answered nothing. If you had failed to do the right thing, talk was useless.

Thinking about his life always left her with a sense of the waste of her own.

For instance, he gave everything away that he owned, every cent, all his clothes off his back. He enjoyed to be poor. He said poverty was a queen and he loved her like she was a beautiful woman.”

Ida called her die antisemitke, but that part of her didn’t bother Morris. She had come with it from the old country, a different kind of anti-Semitism from in America.

With me one wrong thing leads to another and it ends in a trap. I want the moon so all I get is cheese.”

I always have this dream where I want to tell somebody something on the telephone so bad it hurts, but then when I am in the booth, instead of a phone being there, a bunch of bananas is hanging on a hook.”

Against words the liquor dealer had other words, but silence silenced him.

“When a person is young he’s privileged,” Helen said, “with all kinds of possibilities. Wonderful things might happen, and when you get up in the morning you feel they will. That’s what youth means, and that’s what I’ve lost. Nowadays I feel that every day is like the day before, and what’s worse, like the day after.”

“No, I don’t want him, Louis.” But she thought, Suppose Nat said I love you? For magic words a girl might do magic tricks.

“This kind of a store is a death tomb, positive,” Al Marcus said. “Run out while you can. Take my word, if you stay six months, you’ll stay forever.”

The girl was in his mind a lot. He couldn’t help it, imagined seeing her in the things that were hanging on the line —he had always had a good imagination.

There were some dames you had to wait for—for them to come to you.

He wanted to step clear of his mess but saw no way other than to keep on lying. But lying made their talk useless. When he lied he was somebody else lying to somebody else. It wasn’t the two of them as they were. He should have kept that in his mind.

Nobody has to know anything any more.”

“When a man is honest he don’t worry when he sleeps. This is more important than to steal a nickel.”

And he was filled with a quiet gentleness for Helen and no longer climbed the air shaft to spy on her, naked in the bathroom.

“If I stay home, somebody in a high hat is gonna walk up the stairs and put a knock on my door. This way let him at least move his bony ass around and try and find me.”

That’s what they live for, Frank thought, to suffer. And the one that has got the biggest pain in the gut and can hold onto it the longest without running to the toilet is the best Jew. No wonder they got on his nerves.

If Nat would only call, she thought endlessly, but the telephone was deaf and dumb. She dreamed of him nightly, felt deeply in love, famished for him; would gladly have danced into his warm white bed if only he nodded, or she dared ask him to ask her; but Nat never called.

He had nothing, a backbreaking past, had committed a crime against her old man, and in spite of his touchy conscience, was stealing from him too. How complicated could impossible get?

At first she might be embarrassed, but when he started telling her about his life, he knew she would hear him to the end. After that—who knew? With a dame all you needed was a beginning.

At the same time a foreboding crept into him that if he said nothing now, he would someday soon have a dirtier past to reveal.

When you got something good to do, sleep is a waste of time.”

Even at her loneliest she liked being among books, although she was sometimes depressed to see how much there was to read that she hadn’t.

She wanted Frank to like novels, to enjoy in them what she did. So she checked out Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Crime all by writers he had barely heard of, but they were very satisfying books, she said.

The stories were hard to get into because the people and places were strange to him, their crazy names difficult to hold in his mind and some of the sentences were so godawful complicated he forgot the beginning before he got to the end.

He had started Madame Bovary with some curiosity, but in the end he felt disgusted, wearied, left cold, He did not know why people would want to write about that kind of a dame.

Anna Karenina was better; she was more interesting and better in bed.

Crime and Punishment repelled yet fascinated him, with everybody in the joint confessing to something every time he opened his yap—to some weakness, or sickness, or crime.

He felt, in places in the book, even when it excited him, as if his face had been shoved into dirty water in the gutter; in other places, as if he had been on a drunk for a month.

He was glad when he was finished with the book, although he liked Sonia, the prostitute, and thought of her for days after he had read it.

He wondered what Helen found so satisfying in all this goddamned human misery, and suspected her of knowing he had spied on her in the bathroom and was using the books to punish him for it.

Anyway, he could not get out of his thoughts how quick some people’s lives went to pot when they couldn’t make up their minds what to do when they had to do it; and he was troubled by the thought of how easy it was for a man to wreck his whole life in a single wrong act. After that the guy suffered forever, no matter what he did to make up for the wrong.

At times, as the clerk had sat in his room late at night, a book held stiffly in his reddened hands, his head numb although he wore a hat, he felt a strange falling away from the printed page and had this crazy sensation that he was reading about him...

Her first feeling was that she didn’t want to talk to the law student, but his voice was warm, which for him meant extended effort, and a warm voice on a wet night was a warm voice.

“What,” Nat argued, “would people’s lives be like if everybody regretted every beautiful minute of all that happened? Where’s the poetry of living?”

What good is it to sit so many nights alone upstairs? Who gets rich from reading? What’s the matter with you?”

Ida sighed too. “Some people want their children to read more. I want you to read less.”

“When I don’t feel hurt, I hope they bury me.”

After she had accepted his gift of a book their relationship had subtly altered. What else, if whenever she read in her Shakespeare, she thought of Frank Alpine, even heard his voice in the plays?