Free The Tenants by Bernard Malamud Page A

into the hall to Willie’s office, listened at the door, heard nothing, peeked in. The table and chair were there but no sign of Willie Spearmint or his L. C. Smith. Harry wondered had he left the building for good. He searched through the flat, opening closets, and discovered the typewriter on the floor in the corner of the one in the bedroom. There it lay, vulnerable, unguarded. The writer figured Willie must still be upset, pissed off, else he would never have left it unprotected. He worried: Suppose some bum found it and dragged it off to a pawnshop? Unlike himself, who could get by with a pen, Willie, except for penciling in corrections, typed from first to last sentence. He said he thought better, typing. Lesser considered carting the machine into his place but wasn’t sure Willie would appreciate that. When he comes back should I say he still ought to store it with me, or is he now and forever unwilling to accept the smallest favor from a white?
    Should he forget it?
    Over the weekend he forgot. Not totally. The thought of Willie’s typewriter at times weighed in his head; but on the whole he forgot.
    Monday morning, he was in the thick of his long last chapter, stalking an idea that had appeared like a crack
in night pouring out daylight, Lesser trying with twelve busy hands to trap the light—anyway, an exciting idea aborning that lit him like a seven-flamed candle. At just that minute Willie ponderously kicked the door. Boom, kick, boom. Lesser groaned as he ran to open it. Willie entered, hauling in his machine, and without explanation set it: down under the table.
    Welcome, Willie, I worried.
    He was keeping his fingers in the flowering light, trying to seize, hold it, while at the same time foreseeing what it might illuminate in time’s every direction; and memorize all this as he dealt with Willie.
    Looking fully recovered except for a purple bruise on his brow, the black laughed.
    “Call me Bill, Lesser, man. My writing name is my real one from now on I decided—Bill Spear.”
    Bill it was then, Lesser laughing self-consciously.
    “I want to say something going back to our rap that other day.”
    Exuding damp, the writer gave birth to several excuses why he couldn’t just then listen, but could not bring himself to utter them.
    He cracked his knuckles.
    “Won’t take but a minute. All I want to tell you, Lesser, is I went to the library where my chick’s house is near and took out your books. I borrowed them both out. The second one gives off a bad smell”—he held his broad-winged nose as Lesser felt himself blush
—“but that first one you wrote, man, I got to tell you it’s a cool piece of work. After reading it, Irene said I was talking to myself. I tell you the Jesus truth, Lesser, I didn’t expect it to be that good, not from the square dude you are.”
    Thanks anyway, Bill.
    “Although I got some real reservations and one particular one.”
    Such as what?
    “The black sister in that book, you don’t touch her exactly right.”
    Lesser said she was a minor character he hadn’t too much to say about.
    “Like she ain’t really black,” Willie said, “not that chick, though I like her attitude. She has a whole lot of nature going for her and I wouldn’t mind laying some pipe in her pants.”
    Wouldn’t she be real if she got that kind of response from him?
    “She’s not like anybody real I know, leastways nobody black. In some of the ways she does things she might be white under that black paint you laid down on her.”
    Was it the white in the black that aroused him? No matter, Willie had liked the book.
    Lesser glanced behind him as though expecting something he had left cooking to boil over and evaporate:
He goes back to his desk, looks at the pages he had written that morning: not a visible word.
    Willie looked too but went on talking, chop chop. A deep crease had appeared on his brow. He sighed, biffed one hand with the other, studied the scene outside the window, then