 
issue no. 5, autumn 2001
encounters
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Benjamin, Hatless by Bob Levy [continued from October 14] It was a week to the day from the cap's first appearance that finally it occurred to Benjamin Miller from whom the gift must have come. This insight, sudden and certain, came to him on the 7:05 from Greenwich, just as the doors were closing at Manhattan's 125th Street. The Miller & Devine agency had recently added a young copywriter to its staff, initially for a trial period of three months. But when the young writer's work instantly proved to be the most original, most daring the staff had seen in years, Benjamin notified his partner, "We'd better gobble this one up before someone else does. Make a permanent offer. And fast. A good one. Something the kid can't turn down." Benjamin recalled that the young writer had the habit of concluding his or her rough copy by scrawling a squiggly line beneath their name, a name Benjamin could not seem to recall. But the squiggle—it was the very squiggle that appeared below "Thanks" on the note accompanying the cap. "It's a 'she,'" said his secretary. "And her name's Ivy Springer."
"Because you looked as though you could use it," Ivy said when Benjamin asked, "Why the cap?" And when he asked what she meant by "use it," she turned her eyes up to him from across the small table, from behind the vapors of steam rising from her tea, and in a voice June-Allison-raspy from too many cigarettes, she said, "Well, it is working, isn't it?" Ivy Springer was, in a word, adorable. At least ten years younger than Benjamin (closer to fifteen), a chin small and white, cheekbones high and angled, eyes green and glowing. Loose blond curls peeked out from beneath a beret the color of raspberries. Mighty Mouse, thought Benjamin, and he laughed to himself. And from that first cup of tea, from that not-quite-by-accident meeting in the office building's café, Benjamin discovered himself almost constantly in Ivy's presence. He would casually drop in on meetings (this, of course, something he had done in the past, something, as senior partner, he had every right to do), but these latest drop-ins were restricted only to those sessions attended by Ivy. And if it wasn't meetings, it was a rendezvous in the coffee room (she was there at 10:00, then again at 11:30 each morning). Or the elevator bank in the lobby (she took lunch at 1:00 sharp). And once—no, twice—the senior partner of Miller & Devine, married to the same lovely woman some twenty-two years, found himself crouching just outside Ivy's cubicle, pretending to be tying his shoe, all the while listening for the sound of her smoky laugh. Ivy traveled for the firm. One day, she flew to Chicago for the Dearborn Fashions account. Benjamin arranged to arrive there unannounced later that afternoon (using "client good will" as the pretext) and took the entire Miller & Devine creative team out for cocktails, then dinner at Lawrey's. He and Ivy were the last two to leave the table. Benjamin, the green cap pulled low over his brow while he tried keeping pace with the young woman along frigid Michigan Avenue as she held herself tight against the January gusts off the lake, their breaths cloudy and mingling, caught in the red neon of the sign that read CHICAGO TRIBUNE. Of course, by the time he returned to New York Benjamin understood that it was Ivy Springer and not him, Ivy Springer the reason for the firm's recent string of successes. "It's not me, after all," he said the day they returned from Chicago, the cap dangling carelessly from one finger. It had turned out there was no magic in the cap, no magic in the universe, no magical way to return to his creative beginnings. The boy, his prime, had abruptly been flushed clean out of Benjamin. He was suddenly fatigued. "But it does take you back," Ivy was saying, as if reading his thoughts. She grabbed the cap from his hand, popping it onto his head. "The cap, it's definitely made a difference." But Benjamin was gazing over Ivy's shoulder, to the doorway of his office. To long-time secretary Norma shaking her head, then turning away.
"How long have I known you?" Julia had asked him late one evening. It was an evening one week prior to the trash collector's first appearance wearing the cap. Benjamin had been sitting alone in his study—not working, not reading, his mind fixed on Ivy Springer—the study dark but for the small amber-shaded lamp on Benjamin's desk. In what had become something of a ritual, the green cap was sitting atop the paperwork he had brought home from the office. "Twenty-three years, Benjamin, " Julia answered her own question. His wife's hands were shoved deep into the pockets of her trousers. Her shoulders were hunched. On her face an expression of fragility, fear, but at the same time, resolve. "Twenty-three years, Benjamin. Twenty-three. So please don't tell me 'It's nothing.' Respect me that much. And please don't tell me it's only that you've been traveling more lately." Benjamin followed his wife's eyes as they moved from his eyes to the cap, then from the cap back to him. And he thought, Somehow, don't ask me how, but Julia knows. "Your eyes drift now," she was saying. "No contact, Ben. They drift, drift away to who knows where. And every time they do this, they give you away; give away that something's up. Something's wrong. I don't know if you're ashamed of something you did. Or want to do. Or are sorry you didn't. Or you're just wishing you were someplace else. Don't shake your head, Ben. And don't tell me the problem's just this client, or that client. Whatever it is, I want you to do something about it. Like what? Like, if there's some kind of a decision you've got to make, I want you to make it. Do you hear me, Ben? Make it. Because I can't stand any more of this." Once she had gone, Benjamin acted. First he placed the cap in his briefcase and snapped the case shut (though what this accomplished he could not have said). A long moment passed. Then he re-opened the case and returned the green cap to his desk. He removed the crumpled yellow papers from the trash basket beneath his desk, placed the cap at the bottom of that basket, and dribbled the crumpled papers like dry leaves on top. And when Benjamin returned home the next evening, the basket was empty.
The trash collectors drank at a white stucco joint on the Boston Post Road, a bar Benjamin must have passed a thousand times and not noticed. He learned the name of the place—The Hi-Life—from a local cop who had done security work for him in the past. And so at 2:00 one bright April afternoon, Benjamin Miller pushed open the bar's door. It took some time for his eyes to adapt to the blackness; the bar was as dark as a movie theater. But once they had, it was the cap his eyes settled on first, resting as it was on the long wooden bar, the green cap somehow reddish in the glow of the Bud Lite sign on the wall. "Done figured it out," Benjamin heard someone call out, and realized that the someone was the young trash collector, and that it was he, Benjamin, being addressed. As though he'd actually been expected. "Your problem's with me being a garbage man, right? I mean, if I was some kind of lawyer, some doctor type, you wouldn't give a poop whether I was wearing your cap. Hey, you'd probably be proud as pink. But a garbage man...." And, shaking his head, the collector took a long swallow of beer. Benjamin held up a hand. But before he could answer, he heard, "Now here's the way I see it... " Benjamin spun to his left, staring smack into the eyes of the black trash collector. "...Off-hours I'm a building superintendent over on Broadway," the black man went on. "It's a clean place, a big place, and with me doing the superintending, my rent's next to nothing. Well, one Saturday morning I'm out at the trash pile next to the incinerator and what do I find but an old lamp with a shade that was fine. Really fine. So was the stem and the base; real brass, good stuff. So what I did was I fiddled some with the insides, replaced some worn-away wiring, and before you know it the lamp's working like a charm. But wouldn't you know it, the next day who shows up at my door but the tenant who'd tossed it—he was complaining about something or other, his refrigerator I think. Anyway he spies his lamp—now my lamp—on a table by my front door, and now the guy's shouting that if he wanted to make a God-damned donation, he'd have brought the lamp over to the mission for the poor and gotten one of those charity write-offs." The black man laughed and shook his head. "Just like you," and he raised his beer in Benjamin's direction. "Just pissed at yourself for giving up on that old cap while there was still a lot of life in it. Pissed as can be, that's what you are. Like giving up on a woman, a good woman, then seeing her out with another man." "Not even close," Benjamin said, pulling over a stool and setting it between the two men. "Not even close." Both men let out a breath. "Then, what?" the collector Jimmy asked, lifting the cap from the bar, then setting it down. "What the hell is it?"
Benjamin had always intended to let his partner in on his and Ivy's affair. But Devine would have only brought up harassment, or favoritism, neither of which applied, not at all. He'd thought about telling Ned Bagwell who regularly sat across from him on the 7:05 to Grand Central, the Ned Bagwell of the affair-of-the-month. Or his golfing buddy Hy Steinman. Or any one of a half-dozen men. But for more reasons than he could name (though "keeping up the appearance" was the reason that best fit), Benjamin didn't. But that afternoon in the Hi-Life he decided to tell the trash collectors. And when he asked himself why, his answer was, "They don't count." They were a world apart from his; from the trash men there would be no sideways glances at cocktail parties, no fear of a Hy Steinman or Ned Bagley having one vodka too many and spilling the beans. This world-apart factor, it was nothing that Benjamin was proud of, but he convinced himself it wasn't a question of class, but a case of tracks. The collectors and he traveled on sets of tracks which never would cross. And so he filled the men in on the Ivy Springer affair. Then he spoke, and spoke even longer and, it seemed to him, with more passion, about his marriage; the twenty-two years, the two boys, the years of having no money, the bills going unpaid. But through the bad times there had always been Julia. Julia there for him, Julia assuring him that, "We can always start over, Ben. All we need is a couple of mattresses on the floor." Mattresses on the floor, he still couldn't think of Julia without thinking of that line. But that was then. Today's Julia of Bergdorf Goodman and Henri Bendel, that Julia could never go through all that now. He was sure. "And I was faithful," he went on, taking a long sip of beer. "To a fault, I was faithful. I mean, if I had fooled around, maybe I would have been able to keep things in perspective. Not get carried away when someone let me know she was, you know, available. Willing." Here another sip of his beer, and looking right and then left he said, "You two, you're both guys..." Then he watched as, like bookends, the two trash collectors nodded in unison. "So you know what I'm saying." And it did seem they did. "The way her hair smelled," Benjamin began again, granting himself permission—for the first time in months—to bring to mind a specific feature of Ivy's. "Like nutmeg it was." He told the men about the first time they kissed; he and Ivy alone after hours in his office, the nutmeg hair brushing his face each time her head turns. The scent covered him like pollen; it covered his shirt, the tips of his fingers from his handling the pages of copy she had written that day. "I was light-headed," he said, by way of explanation, justification. "Dizzy. Like when you stand up too fast. Or...like a boy. About to kiss a girl for the first time. And when she lifted her face—I just knew it would be right. I knew I could kiss her." "In your office?" said Augie. "That's where you kissed her, your office? Your office, your office is like doing it in your home, man. What the hell's wrong with you?" "Never mind," and Jimmy waved the other man off. "Augie's got one of those marriages where, ten years later, for them it's still always a Saturday night date." Miller & Devine rented a studio on East 52nd and Second. Ostensibly for late nights in the city, for housing out-of-town clients (though Devine had admitted to using it more than once for trysts of his own). Soon Benjamin began stealing out of his office—"I'll be at the Health Club for an hour or two"—arriving at the studio, green cap in hand, at 1:00 in the afternoon, Ivy arriving not five minutes later. Ivy was a self-described wandering spirit (though none of these wanderings had yet been attempted). But she had plans, plans to travel, to live in this place or that. One week the talk was Bali, the next week Peru, then the west coast of Norway, her 35-millimeter with its 28/300 zoom loaded with film, her bag—a straw Kenya bag with red and green stripes—already packed. She was, in her own words, simply awaiting "the call." And what with Ivy's wandering spirit, an increasingly guilt-ridden Benjamin—not merely is he engaged in an affair, but with someone from the agency, for Christ's sake—convinces himself the decision (to continue, to stop) will not fall to him. One day (one day soon he is certain) Ivy would simply announce that "the call" had been received and good-bye, she'd be off to Peru. An announcement which, it turned out, never did arrive. Instead, three months pass, and one afternoon Benjamin hears a familiar voice whisper, "I'm in love." A voice he recognizes as his own. To which he hears Ivy reply, "You know, I might not be leaving...I'm sort of re-thinking, re-arranging my priorities." "Get her out." Benjamin spun to the stool on his left. "You better get that young lady the hell out of your office," said Augie. "And fast." "He loves her." And Benjamin spun to his right. To Jimmy. "Didn't you just hear the man, what he said?" "I heard him," said Augie. "Heard the man say lots of things. Heard him say twenty-two years with one woman. Said mattresses on the floor. Two kids. Hey. You don't just toss all that away." Jimmy was not convinced. "We're talking second chances here." "Twenty-two years..." "And your wife," said Jimmy, "before you're twenty feet out the door, she's gonna be finding herself somebody else." "Twenty-two years..." "Look," Benjamin suddenly said, louder than intended. "Listen to me. Listen. There is no longer a decision to make." Didn't they understand? Couldn't they see? "I already decided," he said. "I did it. It's done." Off to their right, far enough away that Benjamin had been sure his story could not be overheard, the bartender looked up from the afternoon paper. "Do you guys think," Benjamin began, "that I actually want it, that God-damned cap? Are you crazy? I don't want it. What I want is to never have to lay eyes on it again. Never see it. Never think of it. Or her. That, that's what I want." Jimmy's expression was puzzled, piecing things together in his mind, his right eyebrow raised in the shape of an inverted "V" "So," he said after a moment, his eyes narrowing. "You're actually sticking with her, with the wife." Benjamin nodded. "That's it." On his left Augie laughed, then gave one hard slap to the bar. "The man knows what's right. The man knows what is right."
Without a word, Jimmy leaned forward and slid the cap closer to Benjamin. "It's yours," he said, unable to hide his disappointment in Benjamin's decision. "Take the cap, man. Take it and do whatever the hell you want. Burn it. Give the sucker away. Toss it back in the trash. Because if it's really over between you and this woman—and I for one don't think that it is—it's up to you to get rid of it again. So whatever you do, it's got to be you what does the doing." Benjamin reached out picked up the cap. He ran a finger along the sweatband and, for some reason (a final farewell?), stuck it onto his head. And no sooner had he done this than it was all he could do to force down a laugh. He was with Ivy again, lips pressed to her hair, the sweet aroma of nutmeg, of bath oils, her softness flowing clean through him. And it was this—not the hoped-for spurring of his creative juices—this was the magic he had been hoping to find, this was his returning to his own prime. Suddenly the afternoon sun was slanting into the East 52nd Street studio through a pair of bay windows, while at the head of the iron bed in which they are lying, her head on his chest, is the cap—always that cap—resting like a sultan on one of the yellow-striped pillows. The studio has a small kitchen, an under-the-counter refrigerator. During their final afternoons there together—Benjamin's guilt increasingly getting the better of his passion—he hears the freezer's engine click on then off, on then off, every fifteen minutes. Benjamin keeps track of how much time they have left: six clicks of the engine, forty-five minutes more, and then back to the office. Three weeks. Three weeks since he had last seen her. Since he had said, "It has to be over." Since Ivy, despite all his pleading, had walked out of Miller & Devine. He had heard mumbling in the office coffee room, something about her visiting Corsica. Benjamin actually located it in his oldest son's atlas—an island well off the south coast France. The island is French, a fact which surprised him, the name sounding more Italian. Anyway French, and large, quite large, and with many more cities than Benjamin would have thought. Too large, with far too many cities, for Benjamin to simply show up. Though Benjamin Miller had absolutely no intention of doing this, even if the island had been as small as a dot. So small that there she'd be, Ivy Springer, sunning herself on the island's one lonely beach. "I'm gone," Benjamin announced in the Hi-Life, pushing his stool away from the bar. "See you two on the block," he called out as he started for the door, the green cap remaining behind on the now unoccupied stool. His oldest son's atlas showed several ferry routes connecting the island with mainland France: connections with Nice (Air France providing non-stop service from JFK), other ferry connections with Toulon and Marseilles. But the ferry from Nice—if he were to go (which he wouldn't) it would be through Nice—that ferry stopped on Corsica's west coast at a town with the name of Calvi or Celvi—Benjamin was never able to recall the correct spelling. But he did remember the photos. Photos of beaches, wide beaches but rocky. Photos in a Sunset travel book he'd discovered one rainy Saturday afternoon in a used bookshop in Larchmont. "Don't you go and leave that cap here," Benjamin heard Augie calling after him. "I know this Jimmy, man. I know what he's gonna do. Because he's gonna wear it, man. Your cap. Every day. I'm telling you. And if he wears the damn thing, you're never, ever, gonna get over her, man. I'm telling you. Never." Which was when Benjamin Miller, about to open the door, readying himself to squint into the burst of white sunlight he knew to be an instant away, heard Jimmy saying, "Maybe that's what the man wants. Not to get over her. Maybe the man's decided that's just what he wants."
Bob Levy's fiction has appeared in a number of publications, including Other Voices, Cottonwood, Flashpoint, and The MacGuffin. His prize-winning stories include "Three Stories" (1998 Short Fiction Award from New Millennium Writings), "Cloak and Dagger" (Kansas University's 2001 Langston Hughes Award), and "When the Dodgers Meant Brooklyn" (1998 Lone Mountain Short Fiction Award). His collection, When the Dodgers Meant Brooklyn, was a 1998 finalist in both the Mid List Press First Series Award for Short Fiction and the Ohio State Sandstone Prize.
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