The Tenants Read Online Free PDF

fiction or something else?”
    “It might be fiction but ain’t nonetheless real.”
    “Nobody said it wasn’t.”
    The black said his chick was an Off-Broadway actress. “Mornings when she ain’t out working, which is whenever she ain’t rehearsing, the apartment’s too tight for the both of us. She hangs around mixing up in my thoughts and I can’t get my ass to my work. I’m not saying I don’t appreciate her company, especially when my meat’s frying, but not when I have something I got to write.”
    Lesser nodded; he knew the story.
    He told the stranger Levenspiel had been trying to force him out so he could wreck the building.
    “But I’m rent-controlled so he’s stuck with me for a while. Harry Lesser’s my name.”
    “Willie Spearmint.”
    No handshake though Harry was willing, in fact had stuck out his white paw. There it remained—ex—tended. He was, in embarrassment, tempted to play for comedy: Charlie Chaplin, with his moth-eaten mustache, examining his sensitive mitt to see if it was a hand and not a fish held forth in greeting before he told it to come back home; but in the end Lesser withdrew
it, no criticism of anyone intended or implied. Who said anybody had to shake somebody else’s hand? That wasn’t in the Fourteenth Amendment. He was tempted then to explain that he had, as a boy, for years lived at the edge of a teeming black neighborhood in South Chicago, had had a friend there; but in the end skipped it. Who cares?
    Lesser felt ashamed he had bothered Willie Spearmint. If a man typed—a civilized act—let him type where he would. Mind your business.
    “Sorry I interrupted you. Better be getting back to my own work now—on my third novel.”
    No response from Willie other than the absentminded descent of a nod.
    “It was a surprise to find somebody else up here typing away. I had got used to being the only man on the island.”
    Though tempted not to—he bit his tongue for time was of the essence, he was late getting to work—Lesser heard himself say, “Well, pardon again, I hate interruptions myself. Still, knock on my door if you have to, should you need something—eraser, pencil, whatever. I’m in the flat on your left and generally free in the late afternoon after the day’s work, the later the better.”
    Willie Spearmint, obviously a dedicated man, stretched both green-sleeved arms aloft, wiggling his stubby fingers with ease and contentment so that
Lesser envied him, then bent over the large black machine and, focusing on the words, went on plakity plak as before. If Lesser was still present he didn’t seem to know it.
     
     
    Harry reflected in his study how much he had liked, all things considered, being alone on the top floor. I think of myself as a lonely guy, which is to say I am the right man for the work I do, which is to say, in these circumstances. I may hate going up six dark flights wondering who am I going to meet next, man or beast—but otherwise I’ve enjoyed this big empty house. Lots of room for the imagination to run around in. Fine place to work when Levenspiel is somewhere collecting his rents, or otherwise keeping busy. The truth of it is I could do without Willie Spearmint.
     
     
    Shortly after noon—after a nearby siren yelped for a few seconds to remind one, if he had forgotten, of the perilous state of the world—Willie kicked on Lesser’s door with the heel of his shoe, holding in both arms, in fact weighed down by it, his massive typewriter. Lesser, for a surprised second, couldn’t imagine why he had come, was startled by the sight of him. Willie
wore a blue-and-purple sack-like woolen African tunic over his overalls. His hair wasn’t Afro-styled, as Lesser had thought, but combed straight as though against the grain, with a part on the left side, and raised in back like a floor plank that had sprung up. The stringy goatee flowering under his chin lengthened his face and seemed to emphasize the protrusive quality of his eyes,