The Tenants by Bernard Malamud Read Free Book Online Page A

motherfuckn liver. Don’t say that dirty word.
    Art is the glory and only a shmuck thinks otherwise.
    Lesser, don’t bug me with that Jewword. Don’t work your roots on me. I know what you talkin about, don’t think I don’t. I know you tryin to steal my manhood. I don’t go for that circumcise shmuck stuff. The Jews got to keep us bloods stayin weak so you can take everything for yourself. Jewgirls are the best whores and are tryin to cut the bloods down by makin us go get circumcise, and the Jewdoctors do the job because they are afraid if they don’t we gon take over the whole goddamn country and wipe you out. That’s what they afraid. I had a friend of mine once and he got circumcise for his Jewbitch and now he ain’t no good in his sex any more, a true fag because he lost his pullin power. He is no good in a woman
without his pullin power. He sit in his room afraid of his prick. None of that crap on me, Lesser, you Jew-bastard, we tired of you fuckn us over.
    If you’re an artist you can’t be a nigger, Willie.

    WILLIE
     
    Nigger, nigger, never die
Shinin face and bulgin eye.
    LESSER
     
    Nigger, nigger, shining bright
In the forest of the night.

    Willie rows until his eyes are white stones. He rows as he sleeps. The shores of the river fade in the dark. The cheers are silent stars. The floral island disappears in mist. A galaxy moves like a jeweled wheel in the night sky.
    I’m gon drop a atom bomb on the next white prick I see.
    Lesser wrestles clouds of mosquitoes.
     
     
    Lesser, lonely at his sad little party, gets to talk to Willie’s girl. She had been wandering through living room and study, perhaps to evade him. There was no peace in her eyes or big feet. When he had been about to cut into her dance with Willie he heard him
say, “Irene, I can’t lay up with you tonight. You know how hard that part I am now writing on my book has got. I need my strength and juice on my work tomorrow. Wait till Sunday.”
    “I hate your shitty book,” Irene had said.
    The heat had gone off and the apartment was cold. Irene lay under her long cape on Lesser’s sofa, and when the writer tentatively got under it with her she let him, saying nothing. The gardenia scent rose from her body touched with a faint odor of sweat. Sam and Mary, Afro to Afro, were asleep in the study on the daybed with the electric heater on. Willie, a joint in his mouth, was still rowing on the kitchen floor.
    Irene wore on her blond head a chaplet of wax violets she had woven from a bunch one of the women of Lesser’s past had left in a small cracked pitcher on a window in his study. They were faded but brought out the bluish green of her eyes. Lesser had noticed she bit her nails to the quick, plucked her brows clean and badly smeared on brown penciled ones. One was too long, one too short. This gave her face a clownish touch. He was sure her discontent was with herself.
    “What’s the true color of your hair?”
    “Black,” she mocked, in a low voice. “And my name is Belinsky, not Bell. And Willie has been my lover for two years. What else do you want to know? I know why you’re lying here. You heard him say he wouldn’t sleep with me tonight. I saw you listening.”

    “I wouldn’t mind offering my creative juice.”
    “Fuck off, I’m Willie’s girl.”
    It was a bleak night. Lesser heard himself apologizing again.
    “It’s not because of what I heard Willie say. When you came into the house tonight I felt this sense of something I’d lost in the past.”
    “What past?”
    “As though I hadn’t been where I should’ve been once when you wanted someone.”
    “I got the one I wanted.”
    Lesser wondered how the writing would go in the morning. Probably badly.
    “What’s your book about?” Irene asked.
    “Love,” he said, his breath rising.
    “What do you know about love?”
    Lesser wouldn’t say.
    She fell asleep with a sour smile.
    Willie appeared in the room.
    “Like cool it, man,” he said to Lesser on